Memphis Agile Practitioners Meetup

Agile Quality Assurance: The Long Ugly Tale of How We Got Better

Come hear the tale of a company's trek to adopt Scrum and other Agile practices and how they turned a culture of just get it done to one that put quality first. Listen to the woeful beginnings where developers outnumbered quality engineers 7 to 1 and could never keep up during each Sprint. Cringe as you are immersed into a culture where code was king and testing was often scuttled or entirely left out. Despair with us while hearing the agonizing accounts of team ripped asunder by vast distances, bristling attitudes, and disparate values. Follow along with our small band of heroes as they strive to bring the true values of Agile, starting with localized successes while continuously pounding against the walls of inertia around the company's management. Feel the hope as their movement gains hold and their number of converts increases until at last the walls of muscle memory collapse and a new era of collaborative teams delivering release ready, quality code at the end of each Sprint.

In all seriousness, this session is an account of our struggle with Agile with a focus on Quality Assurance. Presented from various viewpoints of development, management, QA, etc. that brought about a cultural focus on Quality that was 3 years in the making. We'll discuss our many missteps, our techniques to bring everyone into the fold from engineering up to management, and how we put practices in place to sustain that culture.

Tommy Norman is a Senior Consultant with Holland Square Group leading their Agile Solutions group. For over 17 years he has been helping clients build solutions using both Agile and traditional approaches as a Certified Scrum Master / Professional (CSM/CSP), Professional Scrum Master (PSM I), as well as a Microsoft ALM MVP. Tommy is a coordinator for the Nashville Agile User Group, one of the original founders of the devLink Technical Conference, a past president and board member of the Nashville .NET User Group, and a frequent speaker at both local and national events. He blogs about Agile, TFS, and .NET at www.tommynorman.com (http://www.tommynorman.com/) and rambles about most everything on Twitter as @tommynorman. When not working he enjoys being at home with his family of 5, playing guitar, and music.