Becoming the Bottleneck - Embrace the Challenges of Testing in an Agile Environment

Testing has a bad reputation for being slow & costly. Speed, price, quality—pick two, right? How can we ensure that testing does not become the bottleneck? We first have admit that we have a problem, and then look at the root causes of why testing is slow and expensive. Among these are: lack of clear requirements and priorities, unclear testing processes and delivery procedures, misaligned goals between product, development, QA, & Ops teams, unreasonable expectations (such as 100% test coverage), inefficient (or unreliable) test automation, lack of ability to parallelize tests, and deployment friction between test and production environments. Aaron will talk about how to identify & diagnose each of these potential problems (with examples from years of painful experience). He will then address what can be done to alleviate them as well as how to deal with roadblocks like rigid processes, organizational inertia, communication silos, and lack of ownership of quality. If Aaron can't solve your delivery problems, and stop QA from being a bottleneck, then at least he hopes to commiserate together—and maybe you can learn from his past mistakes.