The Customer As System Under Test

In a Lean Startup or a Lean Enterprise, validation (did we build the right thing?) becomes just as iterative as verification (did we build the thing right?). This greatly expands the role of the tester to someone who can help bring the testing mindset to the whole team as they prototype, experiment, and decide if and when to pivot, all of which requires the team to be able to connect strategy to execution.

In this talk, I will connect strategy to execution using two kinds of mapping: 1) Gojko Adzic’s Impact Maps and 2) Jeff Patton’s Story Maps.

This will be an experience report of applying the mapping techniques in a large enterprise (Salesforce.com) working in a space with high volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, specifically, building an entirely new data and compute pipeline to do machine learning at scale on a just-in-time stream of production and performance testing data.