The Third Test Management Summit (London, 28 January 2009))
On January 28, we visited the Test Management Summit in
The summit is organized yearly by Paul Gerrard, the owner of Gerrard Consulting. Many of you will know Paul from the Eurostar event where he conveyed his extraordinary view on testing. The day consisted of four blocks of free-of-choice sessions. In between there was time for the attendees to expand their business network, and the day was closed by a central presentation. When the sessions started the Ricoh group separated to join different sessions.
The kickoff was centered on Pragmatic Testing in Agile Projects, a hot topic in testing at the moment. Agile, and scrum as its management approach, are popular choices in today’s projects. Stuart Reid lined out how cross functional sprint teams could ideally fulfill any role, which is a major challenge for testers in such projects.
Parallel was there a session Getting Value out of Quality Centre by Paul Rolfe. The session was an open discussion based on some highlighted points around HP Quality Center Quality Centre. This test management tooling is to govern software quality processes and automate QA testing across IT and application environments.
Key notes from the presentation were:
1. Enforcement of best practices and standards.
The reporting of the tooling is strong but based on following a strict process and not on required flexibility needed by performing testing projects. The advice of the invitee was to focus more on the basic process (because this will be always be more or less the same).
2. Faster to automation
The test scripts will be hardcoded for test automation in the tooling, which is not making the step easier to different types of tooling.
3. Managing progress and effectiveness.
4. Risk Based testing
In contrast to the speaker’s expectations, he received a lot of comments on the functioning of the HP tooling from the audience.
After the break we joined the session Survival Skills for Difficult Times. Despite the current topic, this presentation seemed merely a textbook summary that lacked practical use. After a short presentation, the rest of the session was used by the attendants attempting to unravel the link between the content of slides and the session’s topic.
One of the parallel sessions was about Managed Outsourced Services. Paul Godsafe combined a strong management view with sharing knowledge. The focus of the presentation was that people work with people. Therefore, in every situation it’s important to build up a relationship. A few of the recommendations were:
1. No sales but a use a transition manager to help the outsourcing in the beginning stage.
2. Creating a close contact between the business and the outsourcing partner, e.g. by appointing a liaison.
3. Govern strong personal relationship between the customer and the outsource partner.
4. On a management level, outsourcing will only work if the customer actively participates in the outsourcing activities or appoints a vendor manager to assist in this.
In the third round our colleagues of Sogeti addressed the very interesting topic of Knowledge Management. A subject relevant to virtually every project or company, it unleashed very lively discussions between the attendants about conflicting interests, motivation, means of sharing knowledge and keeping it up to date.
Wikis are one example of present-day tools for knowledge management. The attendees noticed that these are often introduced as the solution for keep track of knowledge, but that in practice there’s a shortfall. Important prerequisites for a successful tool are insufficiently assessed and communicated; its goal, its baseline structure, how to use it and how to keep it progressing. As a result, wikis as well as other tools often fail to realise their full potential. Therefore, knowledge management activities should generally be integrated at the start of every project to regulate time and money to be invested and gradually build up the discipline of documenting and updating knowledge.
The end of the day focused on showing value in testing. Although not explicitly described as such by the presenter, it appeared to represent the application of a marketing view to testing. The facilitator argued for a focus on results and delivering value to our clients. He also pleaded for showing the value of our own work towards the customer instead of the system- or product-centered thinking that is dominating the profession of testing and IT projects in general.
The closing presentation by organizer Paul Gerrard seamlessly followed up on this line of thought, focusing on the value testers can deliver to their stakeholders. A particularly interesting thought carried out was that testing itself has no worth; it is only the information coming out of it that provides value to our stakeholders. The evidence we deliver increases the client’s perception of value, as testing provides evidence of achievements that cannot be judged by time or budget. For those who would like to know more about Paul’s interesting and uncomplicated view on testing, look forward to his upcoming Tester’s Pocketbook.
Our overview of this Test Management Summit in London was good but our expectations where higher. You can see that testing in the UK isn’t a strong developed as in the Netherlands. In the discussion with our Sogeti colleagues this view was confirmed because they see the UK as a country where they can grow strong. My personal view is that this because the management style that UK companies have. They take more risk and problems are being moved forward till the moment that it’s just a fact that people expect less quality when they move into production.
