Donna Pender

Donna Pender

I am an experienced software quality and scrum professional. I've been extolling the virtues of scrum since 2005 when I attended a scrum training class and immediately fell for the simplicity and clarity of the scrum framework. Having dealt with the cumbersome waterfall (and "iterative waterfall", and "spiral waterfall", and "iterative, spiral waterfall"...I'm not joking) process - especially on the testing side - I knew there had to be a better way. For me, Scrum provides a path to that better way.

During my 25 years as a software quality professional, I have worked diligently to improve software development processes, procedures, and methodologies, particularly between Development and Software Testing. Scrum has allowed me to simplify software testing. Rather than spending countless hours writing tomes of test cases or developing test plans that are out-of-date the moment they're printed, we evaluate the acceptance criteria and develop user-centric testing approaches and strategies. We concentrate on how the user tries to accomplish a task so they can get the results they're expecting. Testing this way has helped us uncover defects that traditional test cases simply would not have.

I earned my CSM in 2014, my CSPO in 2015, and obtained my Certified Scrum Professional in May, 2016.