Testing is not the goal!

When I started in the Software Industry 15 years ago we used to physically burn, package and ship releases to our customers on disc. There was an enormous cost to failure – so much so that we spent weeks, and sometimes months, testing before each release. Once the release was finally shipped there was a sense of relief there was nothing more I could do. I lived by the mantra that “no news is good news” when it came to customer feedback.

Today, however, we are faced by an entirely new set of challenges and risks. We find ourselves testing in an increasingly complex world where everything is connected, change is continuous, and failure can be socially and financially catastrophic.

So, how can our teams manage risk effectively when faced with these overwhelming challenges?

For the past five years, I have worked on answering this exact question. In my role as a Quality Coach, I have helped numerous teams not just survive, but thrive in this complex new world.

I will introduce strategies to deal effectively with both the risks we can imagine and the realities we can not. I will explore how deployment is the beginning of our journey, not the end and share the techniques and models I have developed to enable teams to move quickly without compromising quality. Finally, I will argue that we must unlearn our old ideas about testing, development and operation and that a whole-team focus on testability and operability is fundamental to happy, high-performance teams, a successful business and satisfied customers.