As a test lead, I needed a relatively quick way in to help teams I wasn't embedded in. I wanted to understand their scope and priorities, witness some of the team dynamics, and help uncover concrete next steps for improvement. For the wider organization, I wanted to surface good practices I could hold up as examples. For myself, I wanted to find nagging issues that fell into the gaps between teams responsibilities that I could take on and chase down.
The Test Strategy Workshop I developed (https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVJa88rgY=/) served these goals. We started out by listing what the team owned. We identified stakeholders relying on or impacted by the team's work, and considered what risks would impact those stakeholders. Then we mapped a list of testing activities onto quadrants, weighing their relative importance and impact. We discussed what the team wanted to start doing, and broke that down into meaningful actions we could pick up soon.
In this talk, I'll walk through the board I created. I'll explain how I setup and facilitated the conversation. I'll describe how each activity feeds into the next. I'll share tips on how to handle reluctant groups. And I'll enumerate some options of how to follow-up on the action items. You'll come away with a workshop you can use in your organization, ideas about how to facilitate any workshop, and how to take what you learn during a small, one-time intervention and use it to build your career as a software lead across teams.