Help! We have a QA problem! (Niels Malotaux)

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 had just 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’ll show how the empowerment of testers, careful 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.

ABOUT NIELS

Niels Malotaux is an independent Project Coach, and expert in optimizing team performance. He has some 40 years of experience in designing electronic systems, at Delft University, in the Dutch Army, at Philips Electronics, and 18 years leading his own systems design company. Since 1998 he has devoted his expertise to helping projects to deliver ‘Quality on Time’: delivering the right results at the right time.

Since 2001, he has taught and coached 100s of projects/teams in 40+ organizations in the Netherlands, Belgium, China, Germany, India, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Romania, South Africa, the UK, and the US, in fields like electronics, software, space, road, rail, telecom, building automation, parking systems, which led to a wealth of experience in which approaches work better, and which work less in real practice.

Educated as an electronics engineer, from time to time he is still asked to develop embedded products (HW/FW). Focus on Zero Defects deliveries.

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nielsmalotaux/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/nielsmx
• Website: https://www.malotaux.eu