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Help! We have a QA Problem
Niels Malotaux
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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 just had left the company. There was only one senior and a junior tester left. They were facing this huge backlog of work and didn't know where to start.
We will show how empowerment of the 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 abadoning the supplier was restored causing turnover to grow enormously since. Recently the senior tester was promoted to Product Manager, still coaching his testing-successors to keep pace with development and to keep the customers happy.
This result was achieved using Evolutionary Planning techniques: Task Cycles to organize the work, learning how to deliver as promised; Delivery Cycles for doing the right things right and making customers happy more quickly; TimeLine to reliably predict what we will have done when. Because we usually need more time than we have available, we will discuss the options we have to save time. Most options used in projects are deceptive: they don't work. We will also show those options that do work: saving time on what we do, how we do it and doing things in the right order. |
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