CAST 2022

The realm of software quality professionals has no standardization in title or job descriptions. The expectations of an Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) may be the same or wildly different from an Automation Engineer or a Test Engineer.  Is a Quality Analyst, Quality Advocate, Quality Assurance the same job?


Once you get hired, the guidance on growth is not a whole lot better. Competency matrices with vague and poorly defined skills seem to be the norm. So what do you actually work on to grow your career?


In tabletop roleplaying games, such as Dungeons and Dragons, you figure out who your character is, by maintaining a character sheet. A character sheet consists of high level ability scores like Dexterity that feed into specific skills such as Sleight of Hand. Let's take some lessons from this realm to think about what abilities and skills are crucial for software engineering.
Bring a pencil! Participants can expect to fill out a software engineering themed character sheet for themselves as the talk progresses. Individual contributors can use their sheet to inform which skills you want to work on and which skills to highlight in your review. Managers may run the exercise with their teams as a fun way to think about team composition.