Coaching your Team to Test, with Ali Hill + Lean Coffee

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.

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After Ali's talk, we'll have some Lean Coffee discussions. In case you're not familiar with the concept;

1. Everyone writes down a topic they would like to discuss, and sticks them on the wall.
2. Everyone votes on the topics they'd like to discuss.
3. We take 15 minutes to discuss the topics in order of most votes
4. Repeat until we run out of time and / or topics.
5. ???
6. Profit!

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