Help! We have a QA problem : with Niels Malotaux

Topic:
This is about a real case of too many developers feeding too few testers, causing a testing backlog of half a year, with many angry customers waiting for too long for solutions to their problems. One senior tester just had left the company. There was only one senior and one junior tester left. They were facing this huge backlog of work and didn’t know where to start.

We will show how empowerment of the testers, appropriate planning, and involvement of the developers allowed the testers to catch up in about 9 weeks, systematically making customers happy one by one along the way. The senior tester learnt how to plan the work of the testers effectively and efficiently in sync with the developers, so that there were no backlogs ever since. Trust by customers who were in the process of abandoning the supplier was restored causing turnover to grow enormously since.

We will first show how we used Evolutionary Planning techniques in this particular case. Then we will discuss in more general terms the elements of this planning technique. The answer to the question “Who is the customer of Testing?” usually causes quite a shock to most of the audience. However, this is usually a shock of recognition.

Speaker:
Niels Malotaux is an independent Project Coach and expert in optimizing project/team performance. He has well over 40 year experience in designing electronic and software systems, at Delft University, in the Dutch Army, at Philips Electronics, and 20 years leading a systems design company. Since 1998 he devotes his expertise to helping projects and organizations to deliver ‘Quality on Time’: delivering what the customer needs, when they need it, to enable customer success. To this effect, Niels developed an approach for effectively teaching Evolutionary Project Management (Evo) Methods, Requirements Engineering, Review and Inspection techniques, as well as Reliable Embedded Systems Design and how to achieve Zero Defects for the customer. Since 2001, he taught and coached well over 400 projects in 40+ organizations in the Netherlands, Belgium, China, Germany, Ireland, India, Israel, Japan, Poland, Romania, Serbia, South Africa, the UK and the US, which led to a wealth of experience in which approaches work better and which work less well in practice.

Sponsors:
RS Components