Test Leadership Congress 2019

The latest trend in Scandinavian Leadership 
If you really want to make a difference as a leader, both for your employees and your bottom line, forget about standard management principles - Be the Flexibly Robust leader, instead.

Being a leader today requires self-knowledge, not just in terms of your profession, career, and experience, but in terms of yourself as a human.

I clearly remember how it felt giving my very first orders in the armed forces in the 1980s: "Atteeeention! - I will now give the order to ....". Once the task was carried out it was easy to imagine that it was because I was a great leader.

Danish corporate culture is known for its low power-distance. This influences the way many Danish managers act: Issuing commands is very much becoming a thing of the past. It is being replaced with an appreciative and coaching style of leadership, combined with psychological and philosophical approaches.

In this you have a special position as a leader: On the one hand, you have to be both your employees' whip and their caring leader, while on the other hand you have to take care of your own balance. One of the latest bids for a "tool" to care for this balance is "resilience". I see resilience as an expression of your ability to regain balance, when you are about to topple as you have slipped right out at the tip of the rocker and it is so violently tipping, that you are about to fall off ... But why wait until you are pushed to the edge, at risk of falling off? Why not prevent unbalance instead?

I believe that:

• *   The ability to prevent, lies in strengthening your robustness - not the classic common sense of robustness, but the robustness of knowing your own point of view, your strengths, and your fragilities.
• *   Working with chaos or taking control ... there is an ongoing discussion about whether one is better than the other. Personally, I am mostly into "framed chaos". Both chaos and control have their strengths and benefits, but they certainly have their weaknesses and risks, too.
• *   For you as a leader, it is a core competence to be in - and be with chaos. You must be able to stand on deck, in the strong wind, without falling for the temptation to tie yourself to the mast of the ship.

In order to handle this necessary balance, you need to know yourself and your personal foundation - your values. You must be genuinely robust - or as my wise friend and working partner, prof of philosophy Ole Fogh Kirkeby call it; Flexibly Robust.

Starting a new job as an engieer is stressful as they need to go through the process of integration again, processing a lot of information in a very short amount of time, figuring out how and what tool to install, who is responsible for this product, trying to remember all the names, etc, etc...

They just want to start working on this cool new product, how hard can it be?

What is happening very often is, waiting for access, not having clear ownership or not knowing who to ask for some information, not understanding systems, motivation will suffer.

In this talk, Milan will share his experience of onboarding QA and Test engineers. It is a process that is constantly improving with the feedback from new team members. He will explain good practices from his experience and talk about creating a personalized space for every new engineer joining the organization.

We will hear and see what personalized onboarding space contains, how long does it take to complete and how the time is structured.

Session takeaways

• Creating a structured, yet personalized onboarding process
• Values processes can give both to the new engineer and the organization

Many companies struggle with their QA processes and think of them as bottlenecks to their releases. Join me on my journey transforming QA and improving reputation and reliability.

Transforming QA has required me to take deep dives into some of the technical challenges organizations face when they try to integrate an automation-focused QA team. I will be talking about 3 stages of QA adoption: Strategies on smart learnings from failure, pre-planning for success, and key action points for successful implementations (POC, tools, team structure).

I will also review how I created transparent and effective processes in QA that helped in gaining trust from other teams such as product, engineering including senior management team on QA.

Session takeaways

• Leadership strategies integrating a new QA team with Visual validation and selenium.
• Quality coverage on multi-platform, device
• Managing POC's for automation tools 
• Coaching teams to stabilize visual automated tests 
• Scaling teams horizontally with automated visual testing

I wanted to become a better tester, so I asked myself three questions:

1.  Am I prepared to be vulnerable? Yes!
2. Am I committed to being genuinely curious? Yes!
3. Am I willing to be empathetic? Yes!

These three skills are the core of “Humble Inquiry”, and by practising them, I have become a better tester.
“Humble Inquiry”, a technique defined by Edgar Schein, is “the fine art of drawing someone out, of asking questions to which you do not know the answer, of building a relationship based on curiosity and interest in the other person”. 

In my talk, I’ll share my story of learning this technique, teach people how to use it, and inspire people to use it themselves to become better testers.

I will answer why I can find it so hard to be vulnerable and talk about “Here-and-now Humility”, i.e. recognising that I am dependent on somebody else at this moment to achieve my goals. I will share worked examples to teach people how to use “Here-and-now Humility” to achieve their goals.

I’ll give examples of poor exploratory testing I’ve done due to a lack of curiosity, how I learned to trigger curiosity, and give worked examples to teach how to trigger curiosity in exploratory testing.

I don’t always respond with empathy when confronted with problems or conflict, and I’ll give worked examples to teach people how to use “non-violent communication” when dealing with problems.


Session takeaways

• Achieve testing goals by allowing yourself to be vulnerable
• Enhance exploratory testing by learning to cultivate curiosity
• Build better relationships through practising non-violent communication

These days, test teams in many companies all over the world are going through staff reductions to the point where probably only a few or one tester is left. In my proposed session I will present and demonstrate some unconventional tool strategies and approaches. This is from the perspective of a lone tester working on fast paced projects with very little assistance.

Session takeaways

• Here is the GitHub repo I will use for this interactive presentation, https://github.com/jg8481/Tool-Strategies-Lone-Testers-Test-Leadership-Congress-2019 
• I hope that the audience will take away some ideas for detecting high risk areas in the projects they are testing. 
• By identifying those risky areas, they might be able to design more powerful tests to experiment and explore deeper into the products or systems they need to test.

Are you a quality leader with a quality problem?  Every organization struggles with quality at some point in their product life cycle.   Knowing what to measure and how to build a culture of quality with specific and actionable methods is key.  

Join Karen as she goes through the 3 steps you can take to ensure success:

Karen begins by guiding you through your analysis of the issues including product, customer, and organizational factors. Secondly, Karen shows you the five key quality differentiators to implement within your development process. Finally, she focuses on how to create your own Customer Quality Metric for your organization.

Come and see how you can transform your organization into the quality team you know it can be!

Session takeaways

Any test team member in a leadership position will have concrete steps to take when assessing their own organization quality and the steps to put into place to improve and measure.

At one point in my career I was forced to choose between changing my attitude towards work or be fired. Changing meant leaving procrastination and frustration and instead set up goals. An important goal was constant learning.

Evolving and adopting is a key skill. Every day features are released, tools developed. Terabytes of new information need to be processed.

The prefrontal cortex area of our brain has just 4 slots of working memory that together combine into an understanding of the chunk of data you are observing. The brain can connect that chunk with already known information in hippocampus. Occasional "Eureka"-moments happen when those combination brings understanding to something you didn't fully understand before. 

Understanding the set of patterns by which the brain consumes and interprets new data will help boost learning skills as well as make the process of studying much more enjoyable. For example: switching between focusing on new material and letting the brain rest activates both the focused and diffused mode of your brain. 

Looking at something that one would rather not do activate areas of the brain associated with pain. Researchers have discovered that it doesn’t take long for that neuro-discomfort to disappear once you start actually doing it.

Knowing how to learn has been a foundation, base, and iron core for me building solid competences in tech. 

Session takeaways

• Experiences Boosting learning skills
• Neurology of learning to learn
• Dealing with change in tech

When our Business bus moved to Agile city, the driver thought of hiring agile testers from agile city only to find out there is no one. There is no perfect agile tester, perfect agile testing team in the agile city , no magic wand that can solve challenges in relocation.

At the same time testers relocated to agile city from waterfall felt neglected, old-outdated, old-fashioned with their rigid ways of performing their tasks.

As a driver of the bus, what do you do ?
How do you show paths of comfortability in this new city ?
What measures do you put in place for progress?
How do you make your testers feel like home ?
How to develop testing skills that meet the demand?

Ride with us in a journey where testers buckle their seatbelts and becomes navigators, coaches and thrilled to be part of an unknown future.

But wait, what did drivers do with Business Managers ?
How did the driver receive Business Managers approvals ?
How did driver demonstrate Returns On Investments ?

Presentation takeaways

• Test Managers will learn how to lead in a new world , how to re-shape their testers skills to match needs, how to get management buy-in etc. etc.
• Testers will learn about their career growth.
• Business will learn the value of their Time / Money and Investment.

Behavior Driven Development, or BDD, has been a buzzworthy term in the testing and development community for several years. At first glance the elements of BDD seem simple: Testing scenarios! Living documentation! Automation! Reports! 

That sounds great; why isn't everyone doing it? 

Upon deeper dive, it's obvious the implementation of BDD needs a lot of forethought and planning and that teams must approach it for the right reasons. 

This talk will follow the evolution one team is currently experiencing in their shift to BDD. BDD was selected to help them modernize the work that the business analysts, manual testers, and automation testers were doing and to support the larger organization's DevOps transformation. 

Why is BDD the right methodology for this and what does the process look like? 

This talk will answer those questions and share the preparation, major milestones, successes, and failures the team has encountered along the way. Join me to find out what happens when a traditional organization completely turns their old processes upside down sets out to conquer BDD.

Session takeaways

• Learn about a real team's current success and struggles as they work to implement BDD
• Be armed with ideas on how to start to implementing BDD on your own teams
• Draw a connection between BDD and DevOps for leaders who are struggling with helping their testing teams find their place as organizations move to DevOps

Our organization has always been living a dynamic life:  we have to take care about more and more clients across Scandinavia every day, and satisfy growing business demands as Insurance is very competitive domain. For the IT department this meant that delivering with the quality and on time are crucial for the success. Huge pressure is put on delivering, where Quality assurance&test is one of key components within the journey our organization goes on!

Transforming our test process and test organization to achieve better quality and accelerate running of test activities in parallel with the development wasn’t the only goal. We also needed to raise our test process maturity to make a difference to the way we were working, to solve issues and gaps smarter, and assure test team is organically integrated into all elements of delivery chain. Furthermore, we aimed to make our people happy and evolve tester’s role so everyone becomes a valuable team player with the focus on continuous test via more automation. Needless to say, test automation model itself has been turned upside down!

This is the test transformation journey with the big and the small steps on its way, a few pitfalls, great team spirit involved, and truthfully inspirable leadership! Julia shares the story of one big Insurance company on its way to the better future and how we secured “happily ever after”.

Session takeaways

Practical tips on...

• how to assess improvements needed in their test process
• how to plan actions needed
• how to communicate, and practically implement changes needed in an organization

Why do we test on production? Why not avoid the risks? 

Thorough testing before merging to master is great, but it doesn’t cover the unknowns. Staging on shared environments tends to be slow, unreliable and costly to support. Why not just learn from the only true environment by conducting safe and efficient experiments?

This talk is based on my experience of "shifting to the right" testing within the context of back-end systems of bol.com (one of the biggest online retailers of the Netherlands; logistics and purchasing domains), where correctness is often a bigger concern than performance, and recovery might require a bit more than users hitting the refresh button of their browser. 

Testing on production is often associated with A/B testing or canary releases, but those aren't always the best - or even applicable - techniques. We will look instead at shadow and dry runs, controlled experiments, survival of the fittest; how to apply these techniques and what to be aware of.

Session takeaways

• Production as a first-class testing environment
• Managing risks of experiments in production
• Shift-right of testing in backend systems and risk adverse environments

Delivering a compliant product is a resource intensive and challenging activity for most teams. Whether a team is trying to adhere to company, industry, or international standards, it needs to produce deliverables under tight deadlines with the right level of quality.

When you work with Forensic teams the stakes are high. Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) is a new forensic DNA sequencing technology which can result in increased detection ability for degraded and complex mixture samples. It can also provide ancestry and physical trait information which help's narrow down suspects.

Join Aprajita Mathur as she shares how her team successfully built the first Forensics, NGS “sample-to-answer” platform, working in a cross-functional team, using a scrum-based methodology, yet in a compliant environment. For her team, the stakes were high, timelines tight, and quality was of upmost importance to ensure the truth is always found: An integrated “sample to answer” solution to aid forensic investigation teams must be accurate, precise, reliable, and provide information in the timescales of investigation. 

Session takeaways

• Impactful Agile practices to deliver compliant products
• Scrum based methodology in a compliant environment
• Myths about software development in regulatory space

The benefits of testing earlier in the development cycle are clear, but the road to the left is filled with obstacles that make it difficult.  From test suites that take hours (or longer) to run, to test automation that requires manual effort to operate and review, to flaky tests and unreliable automation that cause builds to fail, shifting left isn’t easy.  

This session will review the challenges and discuss solutions, including predictive test selection and flaky failure isolation, that make it possible to test every commit, so defects can be found and fixed immediately without waiting for a full test cycle.

The first and only QA in small startup, one QA in the team of ten developers, QA as a separate team or organization, QA who works in the same team in the same company for a long time. What is common between all of them? They all can be caught in isolation trap and lose their effectiveness and even bring harm to the project.

Isolation was always used as punishment, it increases risk of mental health issues, it is dangerous, but the issue of QA’s isolation is often overlooked. Not using test design techniques, inventing bicycles and missing obvious harmful bugs are only some of the problems that isolations can bring. We need to learn how to recognize isolation issues early and how to avoid isolation traps.

Session takeaways

Managers will learn:

• How to recognize early signs of an isolation
• How to keep QAs connected to the outside world
• The most common isolation traps and how to avoid them.

The name Nassim Taleb has come to be associated with the crash of fincancial markets, as he's predicted aptly what happened in the banking crisis of 2008 in his book "The Black Swan". Following from that work, "Antifragility" explores how trying to predict the future leaves us missing the opportunity to withstand disaster by preparing for recovery instead of trying to predict and avert the inevitable crisis.

My talk examines the concept of antifragility as part of the software development process, and how that can be applied to an agile work environment. It aims to straddle the border between development reality and a broader view on how process can be made resilient, and how we can use a philosophical approach to guide our decisions in day to day software development.

This talk offers a new perspective on many of the problems we encounter every day in software development, and I hope to illustrate that sometimes a change of perspective can point in the right direction for building resilient, lean software applications.

To combat the rapid shift in how we create and release software without compromising quality and velocity, The New York Times test strategy went through a series of transformation from building the right team structure to clarifying roles and responsibilities on who owns the automated tests. The result is the birth of Test Automation Team with a vision to develop Test Frameworks and Test Infrastructure that a maximum number of Development teams can apply/adapt to develop and execute their automated tests.
After a year implementing this model, we are moving towards a culture where quality is truly being considered as everyone’s responsibility and it begins with the product requirements.

In this talk we will go over:

• Birth of Central Test Automation Team
• Use cases demonstrating how test automation team plays an important role in ensuring high-quality product without compromising release velocity
• Behind the scene process of developing and maintaining test frameworks and infrastructure that caters to developers

Session takeaways

• Lessons learned from challenges we faced to adopt a culture of quality through test automation
•  Best practices in maximizing test automation adoption in your development teams
• A practical guide on measuring test maturity of a product

I was terrified. I did not feel that I was good enough. I started thinking that tech may not be for me. I just joined a very high-performing team having modern agile practices as a first-ever QA. The team did not know what exactly to expect from me, and I did not know myself how I can help, so I had to learn to embrace others and most importantly myself.

Having worked in a startup as the first QA it had and then shifting to consulting where I also was the only QA in the role, I had some challenges: there was noone to tell me what a QA is supposed to be within that context. At the start I even did tasks which were not really my expertise, like, working on the infrastructure code. This was a good learning experience, but I did not feel like I was contributing.

Finding the power in just being yourself can be a daunting task, but it’s extremely rewarding. I managed to climb over myself and find ways how to contribute to the team just embracing myself and not trying to be somebody else. In this session, I will share my story of how I did that, and, hopefully, inspire you to find power in your own authenticity.

Session takeaways

• QA role is very flexible and can be shaped according to the needs
•  Often QAs act as a team glue for which we work on adaptability
•  As there is no silver bullet, every QA needs to embrace their authenticity

Something massive was set in motion when Flickr a decade ago showed how they could deploy into production 10+ times a day. A bigger audience became aware of CI/CD, build and deployment pipelines, microservices, containers and proper use of automation, but unfortunately by many DevOps was seen only as a technological feat.

If you roam through the internet for articles, attend relevant conferences or in general talk with people, DevOps is often reduced to its technological dimensions. How it entwines into the structures of business, leadership, people, culture, architecture, company image, feedback and yes, even testing, is however something that unlocks the full potential of DevOps.

In this session we dig deep into that everything else you need to do in DevOps.

Mike Talks joined Datacom in 2013 as a test manager. His unit was in the final stages of a 15 month waterfall project. To help get the project over the line it was all about managing the tests, and telling a team of eight what to focus on next.

Today Mike leads the same team, but the landscape has transformed significantly. Instead of one team on one project, there are multiple agile projects in flight, some of which with only a single tester in place.
With this his focus on “managing the tests” to “supporting the team”.

Find about the change he’s found in his role as test leader.

We are all leaders.  At minimum we must lead ourselves every single day.  In addition, many of us have teams that we lead and serve.  Have you ever stopped to analyze yourself to determine if you are the BEST leader you can be?

Many of the great leaders outside the testing arena that Amy Jo has had the joy to learn from in person, online courses, through books and podcasts include John C. Maxwell, Tony Robbins, Mel Robbins, Brendon Burchard, Michael and Megan Hyatt, and Rachel Hollis to name a few. In addition, Amy Jo has learned and continues to learn from many leaders in our testing community, including the great late Jerry Weinberg, James Bach, Michael Bolton and Anna Royzman. All of these leaders have shared ways to be the best leaders we can be.

Leadership areas along with tactical take-a-ways that will be covered in this talk to assist you in becoming the best leader are: Win the Morning, Win the Day!; The Continuous Learning and Growing We all MUST Do; Embrace and Face Your Fears; Be the Best You!; and Favorite Leadership Books, Blogs and Podcasts.