Zero to Eight: Starting a QA Team from Scratch

This talk is an experience report around my journey starting a QA team at an organization that had no testing in place despite delivering products to global enterprise corporations. I talk about lessons learned for growing a team, getting test automation in place, and working to push fundamental changes through the entire organization.

Deck updated on 10/22/13.

Transcript

1. Zero to Eight Building a QA Team from Scratch
2. Jim Holmes jim.holmes@telerik.com @AJimholmes FrazzledDad.com
3. At The Start
4. 5 Year old Company “Legacy Startup”
5. Major Enterprise Customers 100K+ users
6. Zero Automated Tests
7. Zero Testers
8. Zero
9. Awful Codebase metrics (Cyclomatic Complexity == “OMG!”
10. 33% Rework (and 33% rework on the rework…)
11. Quality State?
12. Image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Train_wreck_at_Montparnasse_1895.„g
13. Awful Rollout/ Release Process
14. 10-15 Release Candidates
15. Company-wide “bug bashes”
16. ZERO TESTERS
17. Impacts:
18. Bad: Support hated the Product Team
19. Worst: Bad reputation with customers
21. Stuff Has To Change
22. Shoot For The Moon
23. 0) Support Team That Actually LIKES us
24. 1) Frequent Releases
25. 2) Culture That Cares
26. 3) Raving Fans
27. Shoot For The Moon
28. Expect to get to Dayton
29. START SMALL
30. MAKE THE CASE FOR AUTOMATION SPIKES, FTW!
31. TELL. DON’T ASK.
32. SHOW VALUE!
33. FOCUS ON RISK FIRST
34. TEAM GROWS!
35. Steady Growth
36. Hire smart, curious folks
37. Work hard at Onboarding
38. Mentor All The Things (Pairing, FTW!)
39. STUDY TIME
40. ON. THE. CLOCK.
41. SAFE ENVIRONMENT
42. AFFECT CHANGE
43. PUSH LEFT
44. EMBED TESTERS (THERE IS NO SILO)
45. HARDWARE MATTERS
46. TIE BACK TO COSTS AND RISK & VALUE
47. VM HOSTS
48. LOAD HARDWARE
49. (PLAY NICE AND SHARE, OKAY?)
50. Getting the work done
51. AUTOMATION IS SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
52. FEW TESTERS ARE DEVELOPERS
53. Devs can help with things like
54. DRY SRP Abstraction Complexity
55. LET’S USE LOTS OF IF STATEMENTS AND 3,000 LINE CLASSES AND...
56. Automation is not everything
57. Grow your ET or Context or Rapid or Whatever testing skills
58. Constant Feedback
59. Retrospectives
60. Three “R”s
61. Reduce Refactor Rearchitect
62. Celebrate Wins, Publicize Failures
63. Whole Team Automation
64. Stakeholders PMs UX/UI Developers
65. At The End
66. Didn’t Get To Dayton, Even
67. Rework Rate FTL
68. Codebase Metrics FTL
69. Culture Change?
70. Image: http://i594.photobucket.com/albums/tt29/yowhound/Cats/kick-dog.„g
71. Got to the moon!
72. “Done Done” included automation (where appropriate)
73. Quality Conversations pushed all the way left
74. Automation?
75. Several Hundred Unit Tests
76. 3,000+ Integration Tests
77. 15,000+ WebDriver tests
78. Non- Automated Testing?
79. 3,000 Manual Test cases -> “Charters”
80. Testing Team emphasizing Exploratory(ish)
81. Release Plan in Place (And Followed, Even!)
82. Good: Rollouts Smooth (ish)
83. Better: Support Liked Us
84. Best: Raving Fans
85. The Takeaways
86. Start Small
87. Tell. Don’t Ask.
88. Shoot For The Moon
89. (Screw Dayton)
90. Be Awesome
91. Thank You! (for staying awake)
92. Jim Holmes jim.holmes@telerik.com @AJimholmes FrazzledDad.com