Meet the Agile Testing Fellowship instructors - a blog post series!
Janet Gregory, Lisa Crispin and José Diaz co-founded the Agile Testing Fellowship to help teams and practitioners around the world learn to succeed with testing in agile environments. We agreed from the start to be highly selective about who we would choose as instructors for our courses. All of our trainers are experienced testing practitioners, who are also excellent teachers and facilitators.
We'd love for more people to know about our awesome instructors and training providers. We'll interview one of them for each post in this new series.
Our first featured instructor is Prathan Dansakulcharoenkit. He started teaching our course, "Holistic Testing: Strategies for Agile Teams", in 2018. He's helped more than 160 students along their agile testing learning journey. We hope you enjoy learning more about Prathan. Many thanks to Prathan for sharing his journey with us!
Q. Hi Prathan, please tell us a little about yourself.
A. My name is Prathan Dansakulcharoenkit. I live in Bangkok, Thailand. I’m running 3 companies in Bangkok and they provide the services of Agile Software Development. In software testing, I have been working for 20 years since 2003.
Q. How did you get started in the software industry? What attracted you to the testing and quality side of things?
A. I started to work in software development in 2003 as a System Administrator and helped the development team to test the software before delivering it to the customer, too. As a full-time software tester, I worked in the number one portal website company in Thailand in 2005 - 2010 and set up the software testing process, tools and acquired the team members. I moved the internal team knowledge base portal website to the public website in the name, WeLoveBug.com in 2008. In 2009, I was promoted to be the service and operation manager and still manage the software testing process and team of the portal website, too.
In 2010, I changed the job to be the software development manager in the Thailand ecommerce website where they joined with the number one ecommerce website from Japan, Rakuten. I set up the software testing process, tools and team. In that time was the first step to adapt the test-first development practice with the Scrum framework and some practices from Extreme Programming.
In 2012, my colleague and I set up the company, Siam Chamnankit Co., Ltd., where we provide the services to change the software development process and practices from the sequence phases e.g. waterfall model to the Agile Software Development with the Scrum Framework, Extreme Programming and relevant practices. The other service is the workshops, software testing is the main workshop we provide for those who work in the software development both the functional tests and non-functional tests.
In 2019, I split the software testing services from Siam Chamnankit Co., Ltd. to the new company name, We Love Bug Co., Ltd. We Love Bug Co., Ltd. provides the all in one software testing services for any software development process.
Q: What’s the biggest benefit you see to a holistic and agile approach to software development and testing?
A: Preventing the defects before starting development and the whole team approach are the two biggest benefits that I got from my personal experience and delivered the experiences to my colleague, customers, universities, software testing community and software development community in Thailand.
Q: When did you become interested in helping others learn ways to succeed with testing and build quality into software products?
In 2008 was the first move to helping the others by setting up the website to share the knowledge and experiences through the blog. The training and workshops are the second step both inside the company and some public for the external who are interested. The third step is to provide the services to lead change of the test-last development to the test-first development approach for any software development process.
Q: What do you enjoy most about facilitating training courses?
As an experienced giver, the enjoyable moment is when the participants get the AHA moment, nod their head and reflect on what they steal from me every hour.
Q: How did you decide to become a training provider and instructor for Agile Testing Fellowship’s Holistic Testing course?
A: I've been providing the software testing workshops since 2012 and the main source of knowledge and experience are from the Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams book, and slides by Janet and Lisa that are shared on the internet. My colleague and I practice the knowledge and experience from the book and slides in the projects again and again before bringing them into the workshops to prove for the participants that not just the words in the book and slides but they are real world experience and can adapt in Thailand, too.
In February 2016, My colleague and I attended the Agile Testing workshop in Singapore and it was the first time we met Janet in real life. On the last day of the workshop, I asked Janet about the loyalty program because I need to bring the workshop to Thailand. That was the beginning of becoming a training provider and instructor.
Q: Please share any upcoming events you’re participating in. Also please share links to your website, any writing or videos you have available so people can learn more about your work.
A: For 2024, I’m going to provide the Holistic Testing both Strategies for Agile Teams and Continuous Delivery every quarter in Thailand. The other sources of knowledge sharing are
- Software Testing blog (Thai language): www.welovebug.com
- Scrum in real life blog (Thai language): www.scrum123.com
- YouTube Channel (Thai language): https://www.youtube.com/@siamchamnankit5205