Aldo Rall

MSc. (Liverpool)

Principal

Consultant

The Growing need for:

Testing Maturity

and Tester

Professionalism

A Changing World: IT and Business Converges

• A dysfunctional marriage

• IT to take on more business accountability

• CEO’s consider technology as the most

significant external force shaping the future

• CIO’s consider market factors as the most

important

Testing has been Changing too!

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The 7 Basic Principles of the Context-Driven School

1. The value of any practice depends on its context.

2. There are good practices in context, but there are no best practices.

3. People, working together, are the most important part of any project’s

context.

4. Projects unfold over time in ways that are often not predictable.

5. The product is a solution. If the problem isn’t solved, the product

doesn’t work.

6. Good software testing is a challenging intellectual process.

7. Only through judgment and skill, exercised cooperatively throughout

the entire project, are we able to do the right things at the right times

to effectively test our products.

4 Underlying Trends

1.CEOs demand Greater Agility

Value Chain Optimisation

Contextual

Relevance

Adaptive

2.Better Collaboration

Breaking down barriers

Collective

The Collaborative effort is driven by 5 Critical Efforts:

1. Communication

2. Content Management

3. Workflow control

4. Transparency

5. Trust

4 Underlying Trends

3.Work needs to Flow Continuously

“Discard dogma, think big, act small, fail fast, learn rapidly – Ian Davis-

Continuous Feedback and Improvement

4.Automate “Everything”

ALM Scope

Any routine process / tasks

Tools and Frameworks

Implication of these trends:

Effective and Efficient

Efficient

• How did you maximize the value to your stakeholders?

Effective

• Did you deliver what your stakeholders actually wanted?

Threats & Challenges to

Testing as a Profession

SkillsLack of

importance by

Management

outsourcingIncreased Complexity

Lack of Innovation

Lack of Acceptance

What are the Implications?

• Business needs to adapt

– Business needs to view IT as a core capability, not a services

department

• IT Function needs to adapt

– IT needs to be more involved with business

• The Testing function needs to adapt

– Testing needs to happen closer to business

– Testing needs to evolve its practices, philosophy and paradigm

= Need for Increased Test Maturity

Possible things to do

Skills

Innovation

Think differently about Training

Complexity

Treat your Testers like Adults

Practise Agility

Collaborate

Automate

Think Continuous

Conclusion

• Achieve Effectiveness and Efficiency in

your context

• Maturity = Thinking different than just

‘faster and better’

• “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting

different results”

- Albert Einstein-

• “Maturity is the Capacity to Endure Uncertainty”

- John Huston Finley-

Conclusion