The document discusses finding efficiencies in software testing. It identifies several areas where inefficiencies commonly occur, such as over-planning tests, duplicating testing efforts between teams, and not taking full advantage of Agile ceremonies. It recommends approaches to address these issues, including emphasizing the "Always Be Testing" rule, better collaboration between testers and developers, using risk-based testing, and ensuring all teams participate in demo and refinement activities. The presenter then opens the floor for questions.
If you’ve shifted left and right so many times, I imagine it’s hard to remember where you started from? The direction of shift was always within a Test Managers gift, but wasn’t obvious. It’s time to shift towards testability.
Ash Winter, Principal Test Engineer at Sky Betting & Gaming covers the following:
⦁ examples of the benefits of an enhanced testability focus
⦁ how focusing on testability can keep Test Managers relevant in changing times
⦁ introduction of a holistic model of testability to expand thinking
⦁ brainstorming – how can test leaders contribute to a testability culture?
Ash said:
“I believe that testability and organisational success are linked. Testable systems are easier to support and maintain. Being able to observe and control systems is a unifying force across disciplines. Why would one not wish to focus on such benefits?"
TestBoss is an award winning invitation-only networking event for leaders in Test Management, hosted by IT recruitment specialist Corecom Consulting.
Agile Transformation: People, Process and Tools to Make Your Transformation S...QASymphony
Many companies are currently going through Agile Transformation or thinking about making the transition to agile. While moving to agile can create great opportunity for organizations, the journey to get there can be highly challenging. If you don’t have the right people, process and tools in place, the true benefits of agile may not be recognized. In this webinar, Andrew Stickland, Head of Client Services, for Clearvision and Kevin Dunne, VP of Business Development and Strategy for QASymphony will discuss the best practices for making the agile transformation. In this webinar, we will try to answer the following questions:
- Who are the people I need in place?
- What are the core processes that I need to change?
- What tools do I need?
View the On-Demand webinar here: http://pi.qasymphony.com/agile-transformation-best-practices-webinar-lp060?utm_source=slideshare&utm_medium=slideshare&utm_campaign=Agile%20Transformation%20Webinar
If you’ve shifted left and right so many times, I imagine it’s hard to remember where you started from? The direction of shift was always within a Test Managers gift, but wasn’t obvious. It’s time to shift towards testability.
Ash Winter, Principal Test Engineer at Sky Betting & Gaming covers the following:
⦁ examples of the benefits of an enhanced testability focus
⦁ how focusing on testability can keep Test Managers relevant in changing times
⦁ introduction of a holistic model of testability to expand thinking
⦁ brainstorming – how can test leaders contribute to a testability culture?
Ash said:
“I believe that testability and organisational success are linked. Testable systems are easier to support and maintain. Being able to observe and control systems is a unifying force across disciplines. Why would one not wish to focus on such benefits?"
TestBoss is an award winning invitation-only networking event for leaders in Test Management, hosted by IT recruitment specialist Corecom Consulting.
Agile Transformation: People, Process and Tools to Make Your Transformation S...QASymphony
Many companies are currently going through Agile Transformation or thinking about making the transition to agile. While moving to agile can create great opportunity for organizations, the journey to get there can be highly challenging. If you don’t have the right people, process and tools in place, the true benefits of agile may not be recognized. In this webinar, Andrew Stickland, Head of Client Services, for Clearvision and Kevin Dunne, VP of Business Development and Strategy for QASymphony will discuss the best practices for making the agile transformation. In this webinar, we will try to answer the following questions:
- Who are the people I need in place?
- What are the core processes that I need to change?
- What tools do I need?
View the On-Demand webinar here: http://pi.qasymphony.com/agile-transformation-best-practices-webinar-lp060?utm_source=slideshare&utm_medium=slideshare&utm_campaign=Agile%20Transformation%20Webinar
Quality Jam 2017: Jesse Reed & Kyle McMeekin "Test Case Management & Explorat...QASymphony
Jesse Reed, QA Director at Questar, and Kyle McMeekin discuss how Questar made the switch to qTest and the key factors you should consider in test case management and exploratory testing.
You’re already selling ahead of your roadmap and your dev team is getting pretty big. Trish Khoo outlines two approaches to keeping pace and quality high without hiring an army, drawing on a decade of software testing at Campaign Monitor, Google and Microsoft.
Test Improvement - Any place, anytime, any whereRuud Teunissen
Test Improvement is all about giving an organization or a team the “means they can use” to help achieve their goals. Means that are in line with their skills and they can use in their context. That’s why successful Test Improvement requires leadership and management. In this presentation I share experiences in Test Improvement in a wide variety of environments, using different models and approaches.
Jonathan Alexander, CTO of QASymphony and other Product Leaders from QASymphony walked through some of the exciting product features and enhancements coming in 2016 during Quality Jam 2016.
The most critical step in the agile transformation and DevOps adoption process is identifying the bottlenecks in the product delivery cycle. So, how do you go about finding and eliminating those dreaded bottlenecks? Tanya Kravtsov shares her experiences along with tools and methods that facilitate the discovery process while encouraging innovative thinking among team members. Join Tanya to explore ways you can use Mind Maps, Innovation Games (Speed Boat, Buy a Feature, and more), Stick Figure Process Flows, and Team Collaboration to identify, prioritize, and resolve bottlenecks. Learn ways to deal with the most common bottlenecks that cripple development progress—data generation, test environment setup, test execution, and results analysis. Automating these manual processes ensures the quality of the product by testing continuously and giving us more time for exploratory testing. This in turn helps improve developer productivity, reduces delivery cycle time, and adheres to agile principles of responding to change quickly while delivering quality software to customers. Leave with a new understanding of development bottlenecks and the tools you need to stamp them out.
Agile Approach: How to Identify Requirements, Contain Scope, and Manage BudgetPersonifyMarketing
For many years IT personnel have sought a better way to manage very complicated systems with an eye on schedule, scope, and budget. Agile methods have been found to be a very successful approach for handling these complex projects. But, why is it beneficial to switch to an agile methodology, and what are the practical implications for you and your staff?
Join us to learn about the agile framework and why to adopt agile methodologies in your workplace to increase the effectiveness of your programs and processes.
DOES SFO 2016 San Francisco - Julia Wester - Predictability: No Magic RequiredGene Kim
Predictability: No Magic Required
Julia Wester, Improvement Coach, LeanKit
When you merge onto a freeway and are stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic, you know right away that its going to be a long trip. Similarly, you can predict the cycle time of your work before it is finished without time consuming, and often incorrect, estimation. Sound like magic? Fortunately for all of us, it's not.
This talk explains the basics of queueing theory; demonstrates how allocation models and pull policies affect the cycle time of work; discusses the effects of batch size and variability on queues; and teaches how to successfully monitor your workflow to get leading indicators of effectiveness. With this information, you'll be doing better forecasting, and achieving better outcomes, in no time!
Agile: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly - Webinar by Clarke Ching Agile - Septe...MARRIS Consulting
Webinar by Clarke Ching Agile and ToC expert. Agile: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. If your Agile is broken then this is how to fix it!
Your Agile teams are busy. Busy delivering. Busy improving. Your quality is amazing. Rework is low. The product looks great. Your users love it. You are a high performing team!
But your internal customers say your teams are slow. This session will teach you how to use the Theory of Constraints to figure out how to speed up, by finding the one thing that’s slowing them down.
This webinar will cover how, in an Agile environment:
- to better control scope creep,
- to reinforce your relationship with the I.T. Development team’s client,
- to be able to make commitments and honour them and
- to decide where your bottleneck should be.
About the speaker
Clarke Ching is a computer scientist with an MBA who discovered Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints (ToC) in 2003 and has been using it ever since to accelerate Agile initiatives. He is fascinated by Agile and obsessed with ToC.
He wrote the amazon best-sellers Rolling Rocks Downhill and The Bottleneck Rules. Rolling Rocks Downhill teaches 3 things: the fundamentals of Agile combined with ToC; how to use those fundamentals to deliver big projects faster and on time; and how to deliver quietly huge transformations. It’s been featured in The Guardian newspaper and The Spectator magazine. It was one of Barbara Oakley’s top 10 books of 2019. It was the #2 best-selling Leadership book on amazon.com, just behind Steven Covey’s 7-habits book.
He has been Agile / Lean / ToC expert in: GE Energy, Dell, Royal London (life insurance & pensions), Gazprom and Standard Life Aberdeen among other organizations. He is the past Chairperson of Agile Scotland. He is a lecturer at Victoria University School Of Management in New Zealand where he now lives.
Today he is the founder and Chief Productivity Officer of Odd Socks Consulting
Identifying and measuring testing debtPeter Varhol
This presentation, given at QAI QUEST on 24 May 2018, describes the concept of testing debt during the development process, how to identify it, how to measure it, and how to remediate it.
We prize our ability to multitask yet we rarely acknowledge the impact this has on our ability to get work done. Teams look to process to create efficiencies but ignore one simple tool that has the ability to transform the amount, the speed, and the quality of their work: Limiting Work In Progress. In this talk I will share my stories and experiences of the power that limiting WIP has to bring a team focus, flexibility and follow through.
Finding Efficiencies in Your Development LifecycleTechWell
Many of us feel like we never have enough time to complete everything we want in a given sprint, cycle, or phase. Even though we can't add more hours to our day, we can add time by removing inefficiencies in our development lifecycle management approach. Melissa Tondi explores a number of areas that may be causing inefficiencies in our overall approach. These problem areas include acceptance criteria for requirements that are not understood, actionable, or demonstrable; unit tests that are misunderstood or non-existent; and demos that don’t actually demonstrate capability. Melissa shares practical solutions that can be implemented quickly. Share your previous inefficiencies and your solutions. Once you have a plan to reduce or eliminate the inefficiencies, you can spend more time in your overall development schedule—and effectively add more time to accomplish what you need to do.
Quality Jam 2017: Jesse Reed & Kyle McMeekin "Test Case Management & Explorat...QASymphony
Jesse Reed, QA Director at Questar, and Kyle McMeekin discuss how Questar made the switch to qTest and the key factors you should consider in test case management and exploratory testing.
You’re already selling ahead of your roadmap and your dev team is getting pretty big. Trish Khoo outlines two approaches to keeping pace and quality high without hiring an army, drawing on a decade of software testing at Campaign Monitor, Google and Microsoft.
Test Improvement - Any place, anytime, any whereRuud Teunissen
Test Improvement is all about giving an organization or a team the “means they can use” to help achieve their goals. Means that are in line with their skills and they can use in their context. That’s why successful Test Improvement requires leadership and management. In this presentation I share experiences in Test Improvement in a wide variety of environments, using different models and approaches.
Jonathan Alexander, CTO of QASymphony and other Product Leaders from QASymphony walked through some of the exciting product features and enhancements coming in 2016 during Quality Jam 2016.
The most critical step in the agile transformation and DevOps adoption process is identifying the bottlenecks in the product delivery cycle. So, how do you go about finding and eliminating those dreaded bottlenecks? Tanya Kravtsov shares her experiences along with tools and methods that facilitate the discovery process while encouraging innovative thinking among team members. Join Tanya to explore ways you can use Mind Maps, Innovation Games (Speed Boat, Buy a Feature, and more), Stick Figure Process Flows, and Team Collaboration to identify, prioritize, and resolve bottlenecks. Learn ways to deal with the most common bottlenecks that cripple development progress—data generation, test environment setup, test execution, and results analysis. Automating these manual processes ensures the quality of the product by testing continuously and giving us more time for exploratory testing. This in turn helps improve developer productivity, reduces delivery cycle time, and adheres to agile principles of responding to change quickly while delivering quality software to customers. Leave with a new understanding of development bottlenecks and the tools you need to stamp them out.
Agile Approach: How to Identify Requirements, Contain Scope, and Manage BudgetPersonifyMarketing
For many years IT personnel have sought a better way to manage very complicated systems with an eye on schedule, scope, and budget. Agile methods have been found to be a very successful approach for handling these complex projects. But, why is it beneficial to switch to an agile methodology, and what are the practical implications for you and your staff?
Join us to learn about the agile framework and why to adopt agile methodologies in your workplace to increase the effectiveness of your programs and processes.
DOES SFO 2016 San Francisco - Julia Wester - Predictability: No Magic RequiredGene Kim
Predictability: No Magic Required
Julia Wester, Improvement Coach, LeanKit
When you merge onto a freeway and are stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic, you know right away that its going to be a long trip. Similarly, you can predict the cycle time of your work before it is finished without time consuming, and often incorrect, estimation. Sound like magic? Fortunately for all of us, it's not.
This talk explains the basics of queueing theory; demonstrates how allocation models and pull policies affect the cycle time of work; discusses the effects of batch size and variability on queues; and teaches how to successfully monitor your workflow to get leading indicators of effectiveness. With this information, you'll be doing better forecasting, and achieving better outcomes, in no time!
Agile: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly - Webinar by Clarke Ching Agile - Septe...MARRIS Consulting
Webinar by Clarke Ching Agile and ToC expert. Agile: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. If your Agile is broken then this is how to fix it!
Your Agile teams are busy. Busy delivering. Busy improving. Your quality is amazing. Rework is low. The product looks great. Your users love it. You are a high performing team!
But your internal customers say your teams are slow. This session will teach you how to use the Theory of Constraints to figure out how to speed up, by finding the one thing that’s slowing them down.
This webinar will cover how, in an Agile environment:
- to better control scope creep,
- to reinforce your relationship with the I.T. Development team’s client,
- to be able to make commitments and honour them and
- to decide where your bottleneck should be.
About the speaker
Clarke Ching is a computer scientist with an MBA who discovered Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints (ToC) in 2003 and has been using it ever since to accelerate Agile initiatives. He is fascinated by Agile and obsessed with ToC.
He wrote the amazon best-sellers Rolling Rocks Downhill and The Bottleneck Rules. Rolling Rocks Downhill teaches 3 things: the fundamentals of Agile combined with ToC; how to use those fundamentals to deliver big projects faster and on time; and how to deliver quietly huge transformations. It’s been featured in The Guardian newspaper and The Spectator magazine. It was one of Barbara Oakley’s top 10 books of 2019. It was the #2 best-selling Leadership book on amazon.com, just behind Steven Covey’s 7-habits book.
He has been Agile / Lean / ToC expert in: GE Energy, Dell, Royal London (life insurance & pensions), Gazprom and Standard Life Aberdeen among other organizations. He is the past Chairperson of Agile Scotland. He is a lecturer at Victoria University School Of Management in New Zealand where he now lives.
Today he is the founder and Chief Productivity Officer of Odd Socks Consulting
Identifying and measuring testing debtPeter Varhol
This presentation, given at QAI QUEST on 24 May 2018, describes the concept of testing debt during the development process, how to identify it, how to measure it, and how to remediate it.
We prize our ability to multitask yet we rarely acknowledge the impact this has on our ability to get work done. Teams look to process to create efficiencies but ignore one simple tool that has the ability to transform the amount, the speed, and the quality of their work: Limiting Work In Progress. In this talk I will share my stories and experiences of the power that limiting WIP has to bring a team focus, flexibility and follow through.
Finding Efficiencies in Your Development LifecycleTechWell
Many of us feel like we never have enough time to complete everything we want in a given sprint, cycle, or phase. Even though we can't add more hours to our day, we can add time by removing inefficiencies in our development lifecycle management approach. Melissa Tondi explores a number of areas that may be causing inefficiencies in our overall approach. These problem areas include acceptance criteria for requirements that are not understood, actionable, or demonstrable; unit tests that are misunderstood or non-existent; and demos that don’t actually demonstrate capability. Melissa shares practical solutions that can be implemented quickly. Share your previous inefficiencies and your solutions. Once you have a plan to reduce or eliminate the inefficiencies, you can spend more time in your overall development schedule—and effectively add more time to accomplish what you need to do.
Path to Agility - Adoption Patterns to Overcome Transformation PitfallsAgile Velocity
Has your organization's Agile adoption stalled or hit a ceiling? Using his experience working with a diverse set of organizations, David Hawks will share patterns he has discovered that avoid common pitfalls. In this hands-on session you will learn a proven path to agility for many organizations and understand where you fit. Participants will apply this knowledge to create their own customized action plan to make further progress on their Agile journey.
The world around us filled a myriad of high performing, large throughput systems that we can borrow ideas from to help our IT teams and organizations perform and higher levels. Join us for a thought experiment where we examine several examples from our everyday world that can help us achieve unprecedented levels of flow and scale within our organizations.
Tilt does not currently employ any quality engineers. How can we deliver quality software? Over the last year the organization has gone from terrifying deploys (followed by
Getting Agile Right - Rebooting an Agile organization in 100 days - Agile Tou...Maurizio Mancini
Presentation at Agile Tour Montreal 2018 by Maurizio Mancini of Exempio and Paul T. Ryan CTO of OpenX.
Many organizations think they are Agile when they are not. Here is how to recognize when you need an Agile reboot and how to reboot your organization to become a true Agile organization.
The Three Pillars Approach to an Agile Testing StrategyTechWell
Far too often, organizations focus solely on the development teams and their technical practices as their agile adoption strategy. And then there’s the near constant focus on acquiring development tools. Often the testing activity and the testing teams are left behind in agile adoption, or even worse, they’re simply along for the ride. This is not an effective transformation strategy. Join experienced agile coach Bob Galen as he shares the Three Pillars framework for establishing a balanced strategic plan for quality and testing. The Three Pillars focus on development and test automation, testing practices, and collaboration activities that ensure you have a balanced approach to agile testing. Specifically, Bob explores risk-based testing, exploratory testing, paired collaboration around agile requirements, agile test design, and TDD-BDD-functional testing automation as tactics within a balanced framework. Leave with ideas to immediately initiate or re-tool a much more effective and balanced agile testing strategy.
This presentation will explain the characters of agile in any given organisation and also categorizes the stakeholders involved in any given engagement. This presentation will help in understanding the characteristics and recommends the mechanism to handle the various situation.
Agile Marketing Meetup: Moving Beyond the Marketing Plan So You Remain RelevantSean Ellis
Annual marketing plans can't keep up with the rapidly changing landscape of digital marketing acquisition channels and tactics. To remain relevant, CMOs and marketing teams need to completely rethink their marketing/growth approach. This presentation highlights the agile process that today's fastest growing companies are adopting - from building the right team to executing an agile marketing process.
In every successful technology businesses Jeff has worked in, the key challenge has been understanding how to scale technology and when to tackle the technical debt that inevitably accrues as a company runs ever faster and faster in pursuit of its business objectives. Jeff draws on his experience to help you understand what challenges emerge as a company moves from a Developer Centric environment to become more business focused. How can you get the business people to have influence on a developer centric environment? How can you manage the challenges that marketing will present?! What principles can you apply to be aware of problems early? How do you trade Agile Practioners vs Architectural Astronauts in a fast growing business? What are the technical debt trade-offs, what problems can you buy yourself out of? What problems will kill you if you don’t move now?
Many resources describe how to accelerate performance of your development organization through adoption of agile methodologies, but very few cover testing in a practical manner. And those that do generally focus on technical details, leaving out how to build an agile testing culture while facing numerous adoption challenges. Leigh Ishikawa describes how an organization needs to rethink testing in the agile world. He begins by taking a holistic look at how different groups combine in an agile testing culture. Then Leigh dives into key components including messaging, concepts, metrics, and tools that can be implemented across different groups; how they are integral to one another; how various data from metrics across different teams should be interpreted; and what actions should be taken. Through real world examples from various companies, Leigh takes you through lessons he learned—from both success and failure.
Why You Don't Want to be a Tester; an agile discussionBrett Tramposh
"Why You Don't Want to be a Tester" focuses on a common discussion we are having among Quality Assurance and Software Testing professionals, especially as it relates to operating as part of an agile team.
In a recent discussion at the Software QA User Group in Portland Oregon, Brett used these slides to foster conversation and to promote the idea that each person should be proactive in their approach to not allow their role to simply become a tester. Solid QA practices are needed more today than ever as we move fast and raise the bar on quality and continually add to our tool belt!
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Justin Ison covers different visual testing techniques; and discusses how visual test automation can increase quality, efficiency, and reduce development bottlenecks.
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The Three Pillars of Successful Test Leadership: Driving Projects, Process an...Anna Royzman
This webinar is designed for the modern test leader. Whether you are responsible for establishing a testing practice in your organization, managing test processes or people, defining testing strategies for your team, coaching testing or influencing your co-workers to adopt successful quality practices, this presentation will provide you the foundations and knowledge to succeed in your endeavor.
The case study discusses the potential of drone delivery and the challenges that need to be addressed before it becomes widespread.
Key takeaways:
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Regulations are a major hurdle: Safety concerns around drone collisions with airplanes and people have led to restrictions on flight height and location.
Other challenges exist: Who will use drone delivery the most? Is it cost-effective compared to traditional delivery trucks?
Discussion questions:
Managerial challenges: Integrating drones requires planning for new infrastructure, training staff, and navigating regulations. There are also marketing and recruitment considerations specific to this technology.
External forces vary by country: Regulations, consumer acceptance, and infrastructure all differ between countries.
Demographics matter: Younger generations might be more receptive to drone delivery, while older populations might have concerns.
Stakeholders for Amazon: Customers, regulators, aviation authorities, and competitors are all stakeholders. Regulators likely hold the greatest influence as they determine the feasibility of drone delivery.
Artificial intelligence (AI) offers new opportunities to radically reinvent the way we do business. This study explores how CEOs and top decision makers around the world are responding to the transformative potential of AI.
The Team Member and Guest Experience - Lead and Take Care of your restaurant team. They are the people closest to and delivering Hospitality to your paying Guests!
Make the call, and we can assist you.
408-784-7371
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Oprah Winfrey: A Leader in Media, Philanthropy, and Empowerment | CIO Women M...CIOWomenMagazine
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Senior Project and Engineering Leader Jim Smith.pdfJim Smith
I am a Project and Engineering Leader with extensive experience as a Business Operations Leader, Technical Project Manager, Engineering Manager and Operations Experience for Domestic and International companies such as Electrolux, Carrier, and Deutz. I have developed new products using Stage Gate development/MS Project/JIRA, for the pro-duction of Medical Equipment, Large Commercial Refrigeration Systems, Appliances, HVAC, and Diesel engines.
My experience includes:
Managed customized engineered refrigeration system projects with high voltage power panels from quote to ship, coordinating actions between electrical engineering, mechanical design and application engineering, purchasing, production, test, quality assurance and field installation. Managed projects $25k to $1M per project; 4-8 per month. (Hussmann refrigeration)
Successfully developed the $15-20M yearly corporate capital strategy for manufacturing, with the Executive Team and key stakeholders. Created project scope and specifications, business case, ROI, managed project plans with key personnel for nine consumer product manufacturing and distribution sites; to support the company’s strategic sales plan.
Over 15 years of experience managing and developing cost improvement projects with key Stakeholders, site Manufacturing Engineers, Mechanical Engineers, Maintenance, and facility support personnel to optimize pro-duction operations, safety, EHS, and new product development. (BioLab, Deutz, Caire)
Experience working as a Technical Manager developing new products with chemical engineers and packaging engineers to enhance and reduce the cost of retail products. I have led the activities of multiple engineering groups with diverse backgrounds.
Great experience managing the product development of products which utilize complex electrical controls, high voltage power panels, product testing, and commissioning.
Created project scope, business case, ROI for multiple capital projects to support electrotechnical assembly and CPG goods. Identified project cost, risk, success criteria, and performed equipment qualifications. (Carrier, Electrolux, Biolab, Price, Hussmann)
Created detailed projects plans using MS Project, Gant charts in excel, and updated new product development in Jira for stakeholders and project team members including critical path.
Great knowledge of ISO9001, NFPA, OSHA regulations.
User level knowledge of MRP/SAP, MS Project, Powerpoint, Visio, Mastercontrol, JIRA, Power BI and Tableau.
I appreciate your consideration, and look forward to discussing this role with you, and how I can lead your company’s growth and profitability. I can be contacted via LinkedIn via phone or E Mail.
Jim Smith
678-993-7195
jimsmith30024@gmail.com
2. What Are we Talking about?
Why Me?
Why is there Never Enough Time?
What Testing Activities do we Emphasize?
Where do we Find Inefficiencies?
How do we Fix them?
What would you do with that Time Saved?
Open Q&A
3. Why Me?
• I’m devoted to the Quality (with a Capital Q) of the SDLC
• My experience is in the QA/QE and Agile spaces, but I
have expertise in management of all areas of the SDLC
• I spent my career focusing on three tenets: efficiency,
innovation, and culture
4. Why is there Never Enough Time?
• Decreased Schedules
• Decisions Made in a Silo
• Risks not Vetted Appropriately or with enough Emphasis
• QE/QA/Test may not have an appropriate “Seat” at the
Table
• The List Goes on…
5. What Testing Activities do We Emphasize?
• Test Planning/Management
• What’s your Ratio (of Planning/Management vs. Execution)?
• Planning Stories by Vetting out Requirements or Acceptance
Criteria
• Testing of the Stories’ Acceptance Criteria or Requirements
• We tend to test these first because they’re the easiest
• Finding and Writing up Bugs
• Reporting on our Testing Activities
6. Where do We Find Inefficiencies?
• Test Planning/Management
• We tend to write very detailed test cases
• How much detail is enough?
• Test Case Reviews?
• Test Plans as a separate document?
7. Where do We Find Inefficiencies?
• Duplicating Testing Efforts
• Give credit where credit is due, but…
• Know your Devs and the rest of your team!
• Who else is (or should be) testing? Find out what they’re doing
8. Where do We Find Inefficiencies?
• Being an Enabler (AKA “the Martyr”) – with Schedule or
Scope Creep
• Give it up!
• We tend to make up the work at the end – which makes us awesome, but
it also lets bad/impactful behaviors continue to be acceptable
• Remember, in order for Agile scrum methods to work efficiently, ALL team
members work needs to be accounted for and it should be evenly
distributed across each day of the sprint
9. Where do We Find Inefficiencies?
• Multiple Testing Environments?
• How many is too many?
• What’s the purpose?
• What’s your opinion?
10. Where do We Find Inefficiencies?
• QE-Only Sprints or Cycles
• QE Hardening (or similar)
• Basically, any time of more than 2 days within a sprint where QE
and Dev are not working together
11. Where do We Find Inefficiencies?
• Not taking advantage of the Agile Ceremonies
• The Usual Suspects:
• Planning
• Standups
• Retros
• Others?
12. How do We Fix Them?
• Test Planning
• Rule of Thumb “ABT” (Always be Testing!)
• 10/80/10 (the only ratio I like)
• Don’t overthink it – determine how much detail is enough across the team
13. How do We Fix Them?
• Duplicating Testing Efforts
• Unit Testing
• Use the DoD (Definition of Done) to your advantage – talk about what Dev is
doing on their own
• Acceptance Criteria
• Use Demos! Have Dev show that the AC is met before checking in code
• Better yet – automate the AC and include that in QE’s DoD
14. How do We Fix Them?
• Being the Martyr
• Use Risk-Based and Context-Driven Approaches
• Know what gives when the schedule won’t
• Be a Musketeer! All for One and One for All!
• If one part of the team fails, the team fails – same with success
• Try an 8/10 sprint:
• The first two days are spent with Dev coding and QE writing tests in conjunction with
Dev
• The next six, we track that stories flow consistently
• The last two are spent either swarming the rest of the testing (because stories weren’t
consistent) or on bug fixes and sprint hardening
15. How do We Fix Them?
• QE-Only Sprints or Cycles
• Ask why? And listen!
• The ABC rule
• Always be Coupled! (with Dev)
• Use the DoD to your Advantage and Swarm!
16. How do We Fix Them?
• Not taking advantage of the Agile Ceremonies
• Demos – from Dev to QE and PO (and anyone else on the team)
• Before Check-in/merge – this shifts the approval of stories wayyyyyyy left (where it belongs)
• Refinements/Grooming - The “Meet” and Potatoes
• “Meet” (not necessarily formally) with everyone that has responsibility for the story
• Dev should give an overview of their plan and talk about regression needs and impact
analysis
• PO should be prepared to answer questions about the AC and edit to add more details
while discussions are happening
• QE should give an overview of what they will test, permutations, scenarios, ask
questions about Dev’s approach and PO’s expectations, etc.
• The outcome is that everyone has what they need to start work and a story is not
considered refined/groomed until everyone gets there
17. Finding Efficiencies in Software Testing
Inefficiencies
Test Planning
Duplicating Testing Efforts
The Enabler
QE-Only Sprints
Agile Ceremonies
Fix Them
The ABT Rule 10/80/10
Know your Devs!
RBT and CD – be a
Musketeer!
Ask Why?
Demos,
Grooming/Refinement
