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TestCon Vilnius 2018

ThoughtWorks, Germany

Finn Lorbeer

Finn is a Product Quality Specialist at ThoughtWorks. He cares about high quality software from his heart. He is an analyst. Sometimes he analyses client business needs, sometimes teams and their processes and sometimes software. Finn loves being the team driver towards building a high quality product. He strongly believes in the benefits of truly agile environments to achieve this goal. In his previous life he was a physicist: Finn was analysing how to build transistors and hard drives out of single molecules. He wants to share some of the ideas and concepts his team developed while working on different projects throughout ThoughtWorks Germany.

Talk #1

Better, Faster, Stronger – Delivering High Quality Products

Did you know you can enable your team to build better software faster while having a stronger team culture? Too good to be true?
In recent years, agile has influenced early involvement of testing in the development cycle. With this more and more testers are testing new functionality as soon as a commit is pushed. Yet such teams still fail to deliver high quality software. Why? What is missing?
Working with various diverse teams across multiple projects, Finn realised that testing doesn’t actually improve software quality. It’s just a bar assuring a certain level of quality that already exists. In order to actually improve we must get involved into much more than simply testing and think about the product as a whole.
In this session, Finn will share specific examples of how engaging with the business, engineering, process optimisation as well as the entire cross-functional team can lead to significant improvements in the product’s quality. At the end of the talk, you will know how to start with a holistic approach to improving product quality throughout the entire software delivery lifecycle.

Talk #2

The Business Value Of Quality

Traditionally, when talking about the quality of our software, of our product, we discuss how we can ensure a certain level of quality. In this context quality is seen as a minimum requirement. The business value of quality from this perspective is in the prevention of potential losses, e.g. by downtime of a platform.
Today, we can see that this picture shifts dramatically. More and more companies move to a devops culture and we can see the same “shift left” happening in the QA space. Likewise, today’s businesses need to react fast to changes in the market. New technologies emerge faster than companies can pick them up.
We want to talk about a high quality product in this context. The high standard in our products does not just ensure our business and mitigate potential risk. High quality in our software allows us to build better software faster. It makes today’s product more resilient to changes in the future. We change our perspective and do not think how to ensure a certain (minimum) level of quality. But how high quality enables our business.