Alexa Beach
Sr. Quality Assurance Analyst for Sweetwater
About
Alexa has over 10+ years of experience in advocating for quality throughout various projects. She is passionate about not only testing functionality, but also testing from the perspective of the end-user. Because of her strong belief that testing should be approached as early in the process as possible, she engages in quality advocacy at every stage of the project, from designing the user interface to uncovering and documenting business requirements. Please don’t throw something over the wall at her. When she is not working, Alexa enjoys spending time with her family at their lake place or a nearby local winery. If you don’t find her there, she is probably at home snuggled up with her pup and a cup of coffee.
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Emma Clouse
Quality Assurance Manager for Sweetwater Sound
About
Emma studied philosophy and psychology, developing her skills in formal logic and analytics. After earning her Masters in Philosophy, she found that the skills she'd developed were well suited to working in software development. She worked at Epic Systems in Quality Assurance before becoming a Team Lead, responsible for project managing releases of software in the Radiology and Gastroenterology applications, while growing new leaders in the company. She returned to Sweetwater Sound as a QA Tester helping to develop their approach to testing a legacy application. Now, still at Sweetwater, she is a QA Manager invested in growing the QA team responsible for testing many of the internal facing applications.
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The Race to the Top… When Do You Stop?
Description
In many QA organizations, career growth is often equated with becoming a people manager. But what happens when your strengths — and passions — lie elsewhere?
In this session, we'll share a tale of two testers, metaphorically climbing QA Everest. Using our experiences and lessons learned to help you navigate the decision, "do I want to manage or do I want to keep testing?"
We'll each share some of our personal journey from QA individual contributor to manager and back again. While you can value the opportunity to lead, you may ultimately realize that the parts of the role that energize you most are mentoring testers, improving quality practices, staying hands-on with testing, and supporting projects through strong organization and communication — not the people-management aspects like performance reviews, HR responsibilities, or navigating formal management structures.
This session challenges the idea that you have to keep climbing the mountain toward higher base camps, including management. Instead, it reframes the individual contributor role as a powerful, intentional career choice that brings deep value to teams. We'll discuss the decision points and key characteristics to help you determine where you want to stop on your journey up QA Everest. Then, we'll outline ways QA individuals can advocate for themselves, define success beyond titles, and continue to grow their influence without managing people.
Whether you’re a tester questioning your next career move, a people manager considering a change, or a leader looking to better support IC career paths, this talk will offer validation, clarity, and practical takeaways.