No testers anymore... now what?

15-min Consensus Talk

Influencing and guiding development teams to value quality and be more effective.

Timetable

2:40 p.m. – 2:55 p.m. Wednesday 14th

Room

Room F1 - Track 1: Talks

Audience

Anyone with a growth mindset

Key-Learning

  • Insight into the industry shift towards wider adoption of the quality coach role
  • Using coaching/mentoring/pastoral approaches to encourage change.
  • Not having a tester role is not always a bad thing
  • Quality is the responsibility of everyone.

It may sound crazy, but imagine going from having great testers embedded in development teams working collaboratively with the software engineers, to having no testers at all!

Two years ago this became a reality at Redgate.

It was a controversial change, but by reducing the number of specialisms in teams, software engineers would need to take ownership and value quality, and hopefully become more effective.

To bridge the testing skills gap, the role of Quality Coach was introduced, who would help the development teams level up their testing skills as well as providing guidance in all things ‘quality’.

As a tester for over 22 years, I will offer my thoughts on this change, and as one of the Quality Coaches, share some of the ups and downs of the role.  Using real life examples, I will share some of the techniques and approaches the coaches have used to influence and guide our development teams.

This session will be relevant to anyone who has to provide testing services to multiple teams, or where developers significantly outnumber the test specialists.

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