What skills help us build quality in?

Agile Testing Days 2015 is coming up November 9-12 in Potsdam, Germany. This year’s theme: “Embracing Agile for a Competitive Edge – Establish leadership by delivering early, rapid & iterative application releases”. To paraphrase Elisabeth Hendrickson, the ability to release business value frequently at a sustainable pace is the very definition of “agile”. That sustainable pace part – that’s where the focus on quality comes in.

We’ve always known we can’t “test quality in” (though that doesn’t stop many companies from trying). But it can be hard to learn the practices that help us bake quality into a software product, starting when that product or feature is just a half-baked idea.

At Agile Testing Days, Janet Gregory and I will lead a tutorial on ways that teams can

build and share expertise in testing and other areas so that the whole team achieves a level of quality that lets them deliver frequently and fast. The tutorial is open to everyone who wants their teams to achieve frequent, even continuous, delivery of valuable software: testers, BAs, programmers, architects, POs, PMs, managers, Ops practitioners and more.

We hope you will come to Agile Testing Days, and if you do, we hope you will participate in our tutorial! We expect participants will push the boundaries and generate some new ideas, as in our tutorial last year where we identified ways to overcome future challenges in agile testing. (I’ve been using some of those myself, such as the rotating group brainwriting/drawing/mapping, and cube-shaped testers.) This year, we’ll again let participants shape the agenda, with these goals in mind:

• Lists of skills testers have that they can share with the team – and effective ways to do

  

  that

• How you can build your T-shaped skill sets and contribute to the cube-shaped team skills
• Ways the whole team can collaborate to make the best use of test automation
• And the goals that you bring!

Please watch our video for more information. Hope to see you in Potsdam!