Coaching your team to Test

Ever found testing to be considered a bottleneck? Right nor have I, ever! Least not this week.

OK cards on the table, testing can often be the bottleneck when your working with ratios as much as 10 devs to 1 tester, if you have been in that situation you know its not a great place to be the sole failure point.

What if i told you that it doesn't have to be this way and there are things to improve this if you are in this situation?

If you have ever tried to answer this question then this talk is for you.

As always these events cannot go ahead without our Volunteers (thank you!) and our sponsors, Craneware for supporting this event both by hosting and supplying catering.

Plan of Attack!
18:00 - Doors open and networking
18:45 - Introductions
19:00 - Ali Hill
19:45 - Lean Coffee
20:30 - Finish

RSVP's reopen two weeks before the event

Fresh from Cast 2019! -
Ali Hill- Coaching your Team to Test

Synopsis
As the sole tester on a team that’s moving towards continuous delivery and building a DevOps culture, how can your team release frequently, and with confidence?

Within my Agile team, the testing activity had become the bottleneck. The testing ‘To Do’ cards on the team’s Kanban board were piling up. As the sole test specialist within my team I felt as if I was preventing us from being able to deploy code to our live environment. Frustrated, we got together as a team to discuss how we could fix this problem.

Our solution? We decided to share my exploratory and automated testing knowledge with the team. My role as the test specialist evolved into a coaching role, which made me feel both excited and nervous. We found ways to test throughout the development process. We learned to design test plans and discuss technical challenges together. We collaborated on the testing effort.

In this talk I’m going to share how my team removed the testing bottleneck, built in quality to our product and started to become true cross-functional team members by increasing collaboration. If you face similar challenges with your own team, you can try similar experiments.

Who is Ali Hill?
Ali began his software testing career as a games tester before moving into a more traditional Agile exploratory testing role where he decided he wanted to learn how to code and move into automation for the benefit of his team.

Now, after having been testing for over five years, Ali is passionate about helping to improve team’s processes using Lean and Agile techniques.

He currently works in Edinburgh as a QA and Continuous Delivery consultant for ECS Digital and can be found on Twitter at @ali_hill91.