Startups usually don't hire testers, but ours did. In this talk we'll explore why our startup hired us instead of just hiring developers, how it worked out for us and our journey to evolve into a testerless environment. Our combined experience spans over four decades working in IT which allowed us to help the teams in our Startup develop capabilities in exploratory, performance and automated testing. We will also discuss how we managed to keep our jobs after we successfully made ourselves redundant.

1. Testers in a Startup. Really?
A story about testers, teams and journeys...

2. Why startups don’t hire testers
@MsNgau @ihadyoujohnny

3. Why wouldn’t a Startup hire ＾ testers?
“the right kind of”
@MsNgau @ihadyoujohnny

4. @MsNgau @ihadyoujohnny

5. Why irexchange did it?

6. Why irexchange did it?

7. What
irexchange did

8. What
irexchange did

9. The voyage
of
exploration

10. Performance

12. Evolving Business
Model

13. Our Journey to
Testerless

14. Competitive
Edge

15. Competitive
Edge

16. Competitive
Edge

17. Poly-skilled Teams

18. What’s your
primary string?
Playing chords.

19. Go forth and
sprinkle test magic

20. Testing is not my job!

21. Testing becomes
a bottleneck

22. Culture
Mindset

23. Story time

24. Cross-role pairing

25. Change in perspective

27. Automated
shakeout

28. Data Injection

29. Everyone has a shared
context !

31. Practice! Practice! Practice!
“The fastest way to
change the answers
you receive...
...is to change the
questions you ask”

32. Agile 101: Story Wall

33. Our wall now

34. The Business WHY

35. What we thought

36. What customers thought

38. $

39. Support anyone?

40. Technologies & Tools - CI/CD

41. Technologies & Tools - Automated Checking

42. Failure Friendly
Blast minimisation
Detectability
Confidence
Recovery
Continuous Deployment of Service: Go-No Go

43. Confidence

44. Detectability

45. Recoverability

46. Blast Radius

50. ● Why irexchange hired “the right” testers
○ Accelerated development on top of an existing
code-base
○ Competitive market & big incumbent
● Why we moved to testerless (testing as a skill)
○ Maintain competitive edge
○ Poly-skilled teams
In summary
● How we moved to
○ Culture & Mindset
○ Process & Rituals
○ Tools & Technologies

51. Testimonial from Greg Frye
irexchange, Chief Information & Technology Officer
“Our business operates in a complex sector, and
the testers were instrumental in helping us
manage this complexity as we brought our
solution to market. Everyone in our team are
really poly-skilled IT professionals who help us
serve our customers and that at the end of the
day is the only game in town that matters.”

52. Thank you
Guy Gershoni
Head of Engineering
http://www.silverband.com.au
Melissa Ngau
Customer Solutions & Delivery Consultant
https://cevo.com.au
@MsNgau
@ihadyoujohnny

53. Interesting reads
1. Peter Thiel ‘Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the
Future’
http://zerotoonebook.com/
2. John Allspaw ‘Blameless PostMortems and a Just Culture’
https://codeascraft.com/2012/05/22/blameless-postmortems/
3. Etsy ‘Blameless problem solving’
https://www.etsy.com/progress-report/2015/blamess-post-mortems
4. John Allspaw ‘Etsy’s Debriefing Facilitation Guide for Blameless
Postmortems’
https://codeascraft.com/2016/11/17/debriefing-facilitation-guide/
5. Spotify engineering culture
https://labs.spotify.com/2014/03/27/spotify-engineering-culture-part-1/

54. Interesting reads
6. The Testing Manifesto
https://www.growingagile.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/TestingM
anifesto.jpg
7. Gojko Adzic ‘Impact Mapping’
https://www.impactmapping.org/
8. Squad Health Check model
https://labs.spotify.com/2014/09/16/squad-health-check-model/
9. Mike Cohn ‘Collaborate on a user story by working on it concurrently’
https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/how-programmers-and-te
sters-and-others-should-collaborate-on-user-stories

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