TALKS

Don’t do a strategy, be strategic!

Callum Akehurst-Ryan & Chris Armstrong

Testing strategies, everybody needs them but what really are they? In a world of highly templated documentation, what makes an actually useful strategy for testing (as opposed to another tick-box document)?

Chris and Callum are two senior test professionals who have lately been working in organisations to develop testing strategies from scratch. In this talk they’ll discuss their process for understanding the needs of testing, developing a strategy and then socialising it to an audience that has conflicting expectations of what testing means.

Rather than being a hypothetical discussion about what the dictionary definition of a strategy is; this will be an experience report that details the real world implications and development of testing strategies in scale ups and large organisations. The aim is not to provide you with a template strategy that you can lift and shift into your project but to show you the thinking needed for strategic thinking.

Takeaways

• Provide a baseline understanding of what the hell a testing strategy is for within an organisation (beyond just being a template document that the internet says we should have).
• Show attendees why we need a strategy for testing through examples of what happens to testing without a proper strategy in place (spoiler: things get missed and quality decreases).
• Gain an appreciation for the processes that two senior professionals used to identify what was needed for a strategy and share it back into the business.
• Share the pushback and comments that have come from such an approach, along with how to bring people along for the journey by selling the dream.