Val Lines is a senior project manager and quality assurance practitioner with over 25 years of IT experience, primarily in insurance and banking systems. She is responsible for the quality assurance practice at Motorists Mutual Insurance Company. Her experience includes roles as a developer, tester, project manager, and resource manager. She has a background in mainframe applications and is listed as the contact for quality assurance at her company.

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Val Lines

2. * Senior project manager responsible for the quality
assurance practice at Motorists Mutual Insurance Company
* Over 25 years of IT experience, primarily in insurance and
banking on mainframe systems
* IT experience as a developer, tester, project manager,
resource manager and now quality assurance practitioner
* Contact Val
* Val.Lines@motoristsgroup.com
* 614.225.8626
* www.linkedin.com/in/vallines
*

4. * Primarily mainframe applications for our
production systems
* Low personnel turnover
* High reliance on subject matter experts for
each application
* QA position created in 2012
* No standardized testing practices in place

7. * Transformation to agile project methodology
* Agile team members work on multiple projects and
production support
* QA functions are spread throughout the team & multiple
locations
* QA practices are based on tester experience
* Test automation framework is nonexistent
* Batch test cycles
* Agile seminars, conferences, etc. all focus on testing with
tools that aren’t readily available for the mainframe
* Test data management in shared regions
*

8. * Metrics
* Rethinking mainframe development process into user stories
that fit in a single, 2-week sprint
* Usually not deployable at the end of one sprint
* End-to-end system testing
* Testing of date driven processes
* Production deployment activities are time consuming
* Rally vs. ALM/Quality Center
* Rally does a great job with user stories, sprints, etc.
* ALM/Quality center does a great job with traceability,
automated testing integration with QTP
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11. * Business and IT management are committed to agile
* Management exception is needed to run a waterfall
project
* Agile coach conducts scrum training for all agile
team members (includes product owner)
* Product owners are very involved in the daily scrum
and project activities
* Agile community of practice
* Plan – Do – Check – Adjust
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16. * Focus on basic regression scripts to build an automated
testing script library
* Can also be used to expedite data entry testing
* Establishing procedures so Operations can execute
* Established an agile project to give the team time and
priority to work on the scripts
* Started an automation community of practice that
meets monthly to discuss what we are learning
* Members are all using QTP for scripting mainframe, object
oriented, vendor package applications
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17. * Scheduler to run the test batch cycle
* Controlled by one parameter card for all integrated systems
* All test jobs follow the same naming conventions
* Created a user ID that runs the jobs that does not have
access to production files
* Training on how to run a batch test cycle is easier
* Job output is stored the same way our production job output
is stored
* PDF generator to create pdf output from mainframe jobs
* Challenge test planners to be as efficient as possible with the
cycles that are needed
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19. * Five test regions to be kept up to date
* Created a series of jobs that copy executable code from
the production region to the test regions
* Developers can update a parameter to prevent overlaying
work in progress
* No source code is overlaid
* Automated the schedule to execute this process weekly,
after hours
* Projects are scheduled into specific regions
* Test data management is a very manual process
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23. * Challenge team to break down stories
* In some cases the stories have been moved from one
sprint to the next or broken down into part 1 and part 2
when it became evident it was too big
* Better approach is to break out what can be done on a
story in a sprint and make multiple stories
* Acceptance criteria may involve having another developer
review the interim deliverables
* Grooming involves all involved parties to get a better
sizing estimate
* Pair programming
* Plan – Do – Check – Adjust
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25. * Front load as much testing as possible in each
sprint
* Acceptance testing for stories is thorough
* Each test cycle is a user story and moves
through any date driven processes that are
required
* With good user story acceptance testing
already done, the end-to-end testing moves a
little faster before the release
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29. * ALM/QC is fully baked for test management
* Traceability
* Integration with QTP
* Metrics
* Rally is fully baked for user story management
and improving on the testing functions
* Traceability isn’t intuitive
* No integration with QTP
* Testing metrics
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30. Contact Info:
Val.Lines@motoristsgroup.com
614.225.8626
www.linkedin.com/in/vallines