1.
TITLE

2.
Nice things
People (also $$$)Time (aka $$$)
☹
you

3.
Nice things
People (also $$$)Time (aka $$$)
☺
X
yay

4.
- GEO AT GOOGLE SCALE -
>1 billion active monthly users of Google Maps Services
>1 billion downloads of Google Maps on Android
>2 million active websites and apps use the Google Maps API every
week
10s of thousands of user edits to local data and map data per day

5.
- QUALITY AT GOOGLE SCALE -
Google has the world mapped - 200 countries and territories
Street View imagery is available across 66 countries
The satellite imagery in Google Earth covers more than 45% of the
world's land surface and 80% of the world's population in sub-meter
high resolution.

6.
A problem coming your way?
“We often find that when doing due diligence, that
the team got the thing up and running as fast as
possible and that's fine for getting to £1-5m revenue
but they’ve created scaling issues for themselves
after that.”
- Simon Menashy, MMC Ventures

7.
- TYPICAL DECISION #1 -
Hiring a QA team to fix the quality
problem

8.
Don’t hire the QA army
Quality issue? Quality assurance!
QA is accountable but has very little power to change anything
Manual testing is very slow

9.
- TYPICAL DECISION #2 -
Hiring an automation team to fix the
testing problem

10.
A bad sign
Subject: We’re hiring! TEST AUTOMATION ENGINEER
Join our fast-growing team of TEST AUTOMATION ENGINEERS!
• Low coding skill is okay
• Write all our tests for us
• We have a foosball table and a blimp!

11.
- GOOGLE’S TURNING POINT -
7 years ago, Google teams released to production once or twice a
month, with the majority of the time taken by testing.
Today Google teams release to production daily or sub-daily.
There was no decrease in quality.

12.
The “Testing Phase”
• No idea when the product will actually launch
• Massive amount of human hours to manage effectively
• Huge waste in expensive engineering hours

13.
What testing really is
Testing provides expert driven feedback on the state of business
requirement gaps, user impact and overall project quality.
One of the ways we do this is by checking things. Everybody can
check things. It’s easy.

14.
Checking is easy. Testing is hard.
A testing expert in your development team will:
• Make sure people get information about your product at the optimal
time to make timely decisions
• Make your development process more efficient
• Design tools and infrastructure to make your developers more
productive

15.
CHANGE YOUR CULTURE

16.
- THE PUSHBACK -
We don’t have time to write tests!
We don’t know how!
That’s not the way we work at this company!

17.
HIRE THE RIGHT SKILLS

18.
ENGINEERING PRODUCTIVITY
Software Engineer, Tools & Infrastructure
Test Engineer

19.
- EMPOWER YOUR TESTING EXPERT -
Hard to find, hard to retain!
• First class citizen within the team
• Similar job title and salary to developers
• Needs management support

20.
LEARN, DON’T BLAME

21.
- LEARNING, NOT BLAME -
• Cultivate a postmortem culture
• Trust your people

22.
>> FAST RELEASES
FAST FEEDBACK <<

23.
EXPERIMENTS
&
DOGFOOD

24.
What’s in it for me?
• Rock solid software
• Ability to quickly change product direction
• Freedom to innovate

25.
THINGS TO DO
#1 Change your culture
#2 Hire the right skills
#3 Learn, don’t blame
#4 Launch and iterate