Changing Testing Culture in a Ginormous Organization

This is a talk about my journey being part of trying to change the testing culture in a Fortune 10 company with over 200,000 employees on every continent but Antarctica. Lots of losses, some good wins.

Presented at Selenium Conference 2018 Bangalore, TestBash Brighton 2019, and Heisenbug St. Petersburg 2019. This deck is from the Heisenbug presentation.

Transcript

1. DRIVING CULTURAL CHANGE
2. Jim Holmes Jim@GuidepostSystems.com @aJimHolmes FrazzledDad.com
3. Slides: http://speakerdeck.com/jimholmes
5. http://leanpub.com/ theleadershipjourney
6. LET’S TALK CULTURE
7. WHAT’S YOUR DAY LOOK LIKE?
8. Some Text
13. TAKEAWAYS
14. What should your Future State look like?
15. Focus on value
16. Focus on the business
17. Identify and overcome roadblocks
18. Find advocates
19. Manage expectations
20. WHAT DOES THE CULTURE NEED TO BE?
21. Testing is changing
22. Testers must …
23. Be champions of the business (not just users)
24. Communicate during all phases (not just the end)
25. Become far more technical (even learn to code)
26. “Technical” is much more than coding
27. Spread testing competency across entire team (Work ourselves out of this specific job)
28. Push for Continual Improvement
29. Live and breathe Lean Thinking and Theory of Constraints
30. Sidebar: Theory of Constraints
31. Think Bottlenecks
32. Find a bottleneck Fix it
33. Move to the next bottleneck Fix that one
34. Repeat Continuously
35. HOW DO WE MAKE A DIFFERENCE?
36. Too often testers feel POWERLESS
37. No influence
38. No allies or advocates
39. No idea where to start
40. A STORY
41. Fortune 10 Company
42. 110 year old auto manufacturer
43. 200,000 employees
44. Every continent
45. Except Antartica
47. MY PART OF THE CHANGE: EXACTLY 00.00025684%
48. “Just help us write WebDriver”
49. Bureaucracy Problems
50. People Problems
51. Castles
54. Culture Problems
56. System Version 1: Three years 200+ team members
57. One Release
58. Over 250 bugs
59. IN PROD
60. Testers didn’t know a single user
61. Testers usually on a different continent
62. Testers had awful skills
63. SOUND FAMILIAR?
64. THESE PROBLEMS ARE THE SAME IN LARGE AND SMALL ORGANIZATIONS
65. WHERE SHOULD WE BE?
66. Constant communication EARLY
67. Know The Business
68. Level Up Testing Skills
69. Constant Improvement
70. MAKING CHANGE SUCCESSFUL
72. https://www.math.nyu.edu/~crorres/Archimedes/Lever/LeverIntro.html
73. CHOOSE YOUR BATTLES
74. You can’t fix everything
75. Theory of Constraints
76. What’s the most valuable thing I can do?
77. What’s the most impactful?
78. Maybe it’s …
79. Testers as part of delivery team
80. Time on schedule for skills improvement
81. DevOps capabilities in delivery teams
82. RECOGNIZE ROADBLOCKS
83. Systemic Inertia
84. Organizational policies
85. Castles (the bad ones)
86. People and Fear/Uncertainty/Doubt
87. Poor skills
88. OVERCOME: FIND ADVOCATES
89. Learn the business So you can advocate for yourself!
90. High-level support is CRITICAL
91. Look for existing initiatives
92. Change Agents
93. SET REASONABLE EXPECTATIONS
94. Pace of Change
95. Scope of Change
96. Learn from your losses
97. Celebrate your wins
98. V1: Release to prod once in three years > 250 bugs in PROD
99. V2:
101. CURRENT STATE
102. Single team
103. 3 Amigos
104. Dev/Tester pairing
105. Testers => more technical
106. “More technical” != just coding
107. Immediate fix of bugs Few(er) bug tickets filed
108. Zero bugs in PROD
109. Value to Customers
110. Happy Testers
111. HELPFUL THINGS
112. Learn the business
113. Learn more about people
114. READ MORE BOOKS
115. Emotional Intelligence 2.0
116. Driving Technical Change
117. Peopleware
118. The Trusted Advisor
119. Lean Software series by Tom & Mary Poppendieck
120. Don’t Ask You don’t need permission to be awesome
121. INFO
122. Slides: http://speakerdeck.com/jimholmes
123. Jim Holmes Jim@GuidepostSystems.com @aJimHolmes FrazzledDad.com
124. THANK YOU!