BIO

Niels has over 40 year experience in developing electronic and software products (hardware, firmware, software), doing requirements, design, review, test and managing development teams. He is also coaching projects, teams, and organizations to deliver better results in less time. His main areas: electronic products, firmware, software, industrial controls, railway, telecom, space…

Talk

Help! We Have a QA Problem!

This is about a real case of too many developers feeding too few testers, causing a testing backlog of half a year, with many angry customers waiting for too long for solutions to their problems. One senior tester just had left the company. There was only one senior and one junior tester left. They were facing this huge backlog of work and didn’t know where to start.
We will show how empowerment of the testers, appropriate planning, and involvement of the developers allowed the testers to catch up in about 9 weeks, systematically making customers happy one by one along the way. The senior tester learnt how to plan the work of the testers effectively and efficiently in sync with the developers, so that there were no backlogs ever since. Trust by customers who were in the process of abandoning the supplier was restored causing turnover to grow enormously since.
We will first show how we used Evolutionary Planning techniques in this particular case. Then we will discuss in more general terms the elements of this planning technique. The answer to the question “Who is the customer of Testing?” usually causes quite a shock to most of the audience. However, this is usually a shock of recognition.