I’m thrilled to be speaking at PHP Yorkshire this year. After helping out organise the conference for the last couple of years, it’s nice to be speaking there this year.

Those teams working in an agile fashion will usually bring the tester in as early as possible in the development cycle — often during the planning stages — to find potential problems before they create work to fix. But checking for potential technical problems is only a small part of what the QA team can do in this stage.

The QA team has a wide scope to make the product as good as it can be. This allows the tester to use not just their technical knowledge, but their non-technical knowledge, in their quest for quality.

In this talk, we will be outlining those non technical disciplines that a tester has, from historian to lawyer, and even spy. Testers will come away from this talk full of ideas of questions to ask of their product, while other members of the team will come away with a greater understanding of the knowledge a good tester can bring to the table.

Items covered will include accessibility, data protection, misuse of a product, and being culturally sensitive.