Page - 40 - in The Future of Software Quality Assurance

40 P.Gerrard that introduced the initiative was titled, ‘Developing Testing Skills to Address ProductQualityChallenges’. What started as an attempt to create a 3-day class for beginner testers became a much more substantial learning and development (L&D) program. This chapter describes the reasonswhy the programis necessary, the current statusand howit is likely toevolve in the future. 1.2 Stakeholders Thestakeholders in thisprogramare: it@cork Skillnet offers a broad range of training courses to address the varied training needs of our member companies, who operate at all levels across the IT sectorandbeyond.1 SoftTest is Ireland’s Independent Software Testing Special Interest Group. Its goal is to facilitateknowledgesharingwithin the Irish software testing community. Program Members are the group of software testing professionals representing software companies based in the south of Ireland. At the time of writing, there are 23 members from industries as diverse as software services, healthcare, FinTech, security,gaming,computerhardware, insurance,biotechandHRsystems. 1.3 Initiation Thefirst meeting inNovemberhad twogoals: 1. To introduce the participants and outline the difficulties faced by the Program Members 2. To identify the skills and capabilities required to achieve a professional and productive levelofcompetence James Trindle of McAfee introduced the session with a brief presentation summarizing the problems currently faced by software teams in acquiring and retaining talented testers. His talk offered a stark prospect, and in fact he called it anexistential crisis. Paul Gerrard facilitated the discussion of these problems to define the scope of the challenges faced. The meeting then split into smaller groups to brainstorm the skills requirementsforaprofessional tester. 1it@cork is a leading not for profit independent organization representing the Tech Sector in the South of Ireland. it@cork manages it@cork Skillnet, which is funded by Skillnet Ireland and member company contributions. Skillnet Ireland is a national agency dedicated to the promotion and facilitation of workforce learning in Ireland. It is funded from the National Training Fund through the Department ofEducation and Skills.