A Traditional Test Managers' Support Group for Adopting Agility
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So much of moving traditional test teams towards agile methods & testing is focused towards the individual tester and testing techniques. As often is the case in agility—directors, managers, team leaders and test-centric project managers are sort of marginalized. But not in this session! Here we want to focus on agile testing from the perspective of the Test Leader. We’ll pair off into groups and examine some of the greatest challenges when it comes to leading a testing team from traditional towards agile testing and emerge real-world strategies for surviving and thriving in agile testing.
Some of the key challenge areas that come into play for Traditional Test Managers in their agile adoptions include:
- Team training - skills gaps and how to fill them quickly
- Hiring great agile testers; removing testers who don’t “fit”
- Moving testers to do more requirements focused work
- Becoming more comfortable technically (product stack, scripting, programming)
- Partnering w/team members (Business, BA, Development, PO)
- Championing & fostering quality across the team; quality up-front
- Still providing metrics, traceability, data, release decision-making guidance in
- Truly “partnering” with the development team
- Tools, changing automation approaches (simple, open source, multi-sourced)
In this session, I want to explore from the attendee perspective— (1) what are the more challenging areas in migrating test teams towards agility, (2) what are some of the strategies they’ve used to effectively coach and/or lead the transformations, and (3) what have been their personal transformation challenges and how have they approached them
Introduction
For 20 minutes I’ll share on key challenges and the focus of the workshop. We’ll look to align groups / tables to specific challenge areas, so that there is affinity to the groups. I haven’t decided yet on whether I’ll “seed” the groups, solicit themes from the overall group, or some combination. I’m leaning towards the combination of “seeding” tables, but also allowing for groups to gather on a set of 2-3 topics that I haven’t thought about.
Collaboration Session #1
We’ll break into groups and share on challenging areas and then brainstorm strategies for approaching those challenges. This part will be 30 minutes. 10 minutes exploring and expanding on the challenge areas (adding characteristics and nuance) and then 20 minutes for the strategy part.
De-Brief Session #1
15 minutes of sharing strategies AND general discussion
Individual Session #2
10 minutes. Then I want us to get quiet and reflective. Each leader will spend some time reflecting on their personal challenges in making the shift. What have they found to be the hardest challenges—personally. And how have they approached changing?
De-Brief Session #2 and Workshop Wrap-up
15 minutes of sharing personal challenges, strategies AND general discussion
- What are the more challenging areas in migrating test teams towards agility,
- What are some of the strategies they’ve used to effectively coach and/or lead the transformations, and
- What have been their personal transformation challenges and how have they approached them
