- Identify and focus on “what really matters”
- Listen to and learn from your key context drivers
- Create practical decision-making workflows
- Dynamically prioritize testing objectives and tasks
- Triage ruthlessly to deliver the most value with limited time
- Avoid wasteful re-work when implementing and executing tests
Test Teams and Testers Dealing with Severe Time Limits
Picture a cast-in-concrete delivery date looming on your project’s horizon. While you have precious little time remaining, the development team keeps delivering incomplete builds of less-than-stable code. Is this a “death march” project, or can the testing team actually do something useful—perhaps even save the day?
Based on successful testing experiences from outrageously turbulent projects, Testing Under Pressure reveals proven principles that you can immediately apply to your own testing world. Rather than wondering if the sky is falling, you’ll develop a set of practical, repeatable skills and tools to keep yourself and your team focused on what really matters most. Instead of a checklist of what to do next, you’ll have the knowledge and confidence to think on your feet and decide every week—and every day—the most important things to do next.
Real World Strategies
With real-world examples and lively group discussions you’ll learn ways to apply these practices in your project, your team’s development lifecycle, and your organization. If you are looking for effective testing strategies when time is running out, development is late, and change is rampant, this class is for you.
Who Should Attend
Test managers, test leads, and testers who operate in an environment in which projects have fixed release deadlines, priorities change constantly, or testing resources are scarce will benefit from this course. Project managers, QA managers, and development managers in these same circumstances will benefit from the approaches and skills developed in Testing Under Pressure.
1-Day Course Outline
Overview
Key pain points
What does testing really do?
Testing under pressure
Begin with the End in Mind
Fundamental question: Are we there yet?
What quality is all about
Dijkstra’s truth about testing
Pareto analysis
Active Context Listening and Acting
Influence and decision making
Identifying context drivers
Business values
Technological solutions
Organizational structures
Dynamic listeners
Taking action
Decision-making Patterns
First things first
Workflow models
Identifying stakeholders
Individual decisions
Priority, severity, and consequence
Getting stakeholder buy-in
Adapt to change—making it real
Ruthlessly Triage
Test idea sources
Trade-offs
Impact estimation
Gaining credibility
Rejecting ideas
When and how to triage
What—and what not—to test
Triage and stakeholder value
Offering alternatives
The Last Best Build
Software delivery palette
Objective assessment
Subjective assessment
Trade-offs
Getting Organized for Extreme Time Pressure
Getting things done
Testing the builds
Smoke testing
FAST: Functional Acceptance Simple Testing
Focused regression testing
Session-based exploratory testing
Group Discussions
Numerous Examples and Case Studies
