Communicating Testing Value in an Agile World

In this hands-on and interactive workshop you will learn how to advocate for quality like a pro in your team and organisation. Paul and Huib will share their experiences and let you practice how to think and talk about testing and quality.

You will learn how to explain the value of good testing and how automation is important but only part of the solution. Think of it as your personal plan to get better at communicating with others to gain cooperation on improving software quality.

Teams and organisations have questions about the products they develop: “Why can’t we automate all the testing?“, “Development would be faster if we used {X} practice, just like {successful company Y}!“, “Why don’t we do prevention instead of testing?“, “Why didn’t we find that bug before we released?“, “Why is testing taking so long?“, “Why is Testing is a bottleneck?” and “Why can’t developers do the testing? Why don’t we just get everyone to test?”

Questions like these often arise when there is trouble in the organisation that seems to come from quality related issues. And to respond to these questions you must understand how software development works; how testing and quality fit in the process; and, how they relate to each other. Only then can you productively solve problems without being crippled by symptom control and implementing unhelpful concepts.

This workshop is for everybody who wants to provide value by learning to communicate and providing information on how testing is valuable. To do so, we need to think clearly. And to be able to do that, you need to recognise the difficult situations. This workshop will help you achieve that: we will go into how to explain what you do in your job to various levels of people, from C-level to devs to POs. How to describe testing and quality in a way that explains how integral it is for software development. How to successfully integrate testing & quality into a team at various places (pairing, code reviews, etc).