A Lean Approach to Sharing the Testing - Ali Hill

Talk Description

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 newly implemented 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. 

By using our 3Cs board, the team reached a solution. We decided to share my testing knowledge within 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 by using Lean techniques, built-in quality to our product and started to become true cross-functional team members by increasing collaboration. I'll also discuss the challenges we faced, such as making this new approach a habit, and how we overcame them. 

If you face similar challenges with your own team, you can try similar experiments.

By the end of this session, you'll be able to:

Ali Hill

QA and Continuous Delivery Consultant

Ali began his software testing career testing video games before moving into an Agile testing role. He now works as a QA and Continuous Delivery Consultant at ECS Digital. He has a passion for learning. Recently Ali has been interested in learning how software testing can flourish in the world of DevOps and Continuous Delivery and has been sharing his testing knowledge within his cross-functional team. Ali can be found talking about testing on Twitter, blogging or at the Edinburgh Ministry of Testing Meetup.