T13 Concurrent Class
10/3/2013 1:30:00 PM
"Swimming with the Salmon:
Lessons in Moving Quality
Upstream"
Presented by:
Colleen Kirtland
Harish Krishnankutty
Brought to you by:
340 Corporate Way, Suite 300, Orange Park, FL 32073
888-268-8770 ∙ 904-278-0524 ∙ [email protected] ∙ www.sqe.com
Colleen Kirtland
The Capital Group
Industry veteran Colleen Kirtland is passionate about QA and the role of technology in helping to effect positive social change. As technology transforms the way we do things, there is a need to include not only solution quality but also human factors and organizational behavior as aspects of measuring quality. As an evangelist of proven quality practices, Colleen has served both as a leader and individual contributor in multiple companies and industries. She currently works as enterprise QA practice lead at The Capital Group Companies.
Harish Krishnankutty
Infosys Limited
Currently leading the test consulting practice at Infosys Limited, Harish Krishnankutty has spent more than a decade evangelizing, advocating, and championing QA and testing in large business organizations. Harish has scripted, directed, and taken the roles of pilot, co-pilot, coach, foot soldier, and occasional villain (for the quality averse) in several successful—and not-so-successful—QA transformation stories played at banks, manufacturers, asset managers, and apparel retailers, to name a few.
9/19/2013
1
Lessons in moving Quality Upstream
Colleen Kirtland and Harish Krishnankutty
Facts about the Salmon Run: and their
relevance to the QA profession
� Salmon swim upstream because the livelihood of their species depends on it
� They leverage “magnetoception” which allows them to perceive direction, location, altitude
� They are “anadromous” (Greek “run upward”) from saltwater to fresh water
� They return to their natal rivers. They have a great sense of “home” and “origin”
Motivation and willingness to swim against the tide
Trusts instincts and gut feel
Adaptable to many environments
Rooted in core values
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The context of our Salmon Run� Enterprise QA team in a corporate setting. Traditional
corporate management structure
� Mixed delivery methods (Agile, Traditional)
� 80/20 outsourced Vendor to Associate ratio
� Over 200 applications supported by QA team
� 1 year of enterprise funded QA Transformation followed by sustained investment in continuous improvement
Timeline
~ 1 year transformation delivers standard enterprise QA capabilities
QA teams centralized
Outsourcing & centralized QA
Services expanded Present Day:Ongoing QA standards sustainment and continuous improvement
The Complete Salmon Run: QA needs to
swim the full distance between lifecycle start and end
Structure enduring requirements/stories using a Business Capability Model (BCM) –or- Epic Map
Work with support teams to perfect Root Cause Analysis. Focus on data quality of logged Incidents and Problems in the field
SDLC
ITIL
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Hold the line down stream in the river: work with your support teams to perfect Incident &
Problem data
� Too much “noise” in Problem tickets. Hard to tell what was a truly preventable defect
� No way to easily discern root cause
� Lack of consistency between data in multiple tools (e.g. Remedy and Quality Center)
Issues/Challenges:
Known Errors
Incidents
Problems
Known ErrorsKnown
ErrorsKnown Errors
In the whole universe of Production issue data, how can QA readily discern preventable defects?
How to swim through dams: Establish
quality gates, but make sure water can still flow through
� Quality gates are established to determine the level of “pass-through” /acceptable quality all along the river
� Gates are not the same as speed bumps
� Leverage project managers and/or scrum masters to establish and man the gates
To all ye who pass through: we’re measuring technical debt early and often!
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Swim all the way upstream to influence
Requirements Management: Leverage a
Business Capability Model to help
� Use a Business Capability Model (BCM) to help structure requirements.
� The BCM can be propagated in tools that drive delivery (e.g. Quality Center, TFS, home grown)
The BCM is a technology agnostic way of describing WHAT your core business does.. NOT how they do it
Measuring the Salmon Run: Business Value
Metrics (BVM)
The Salmon Run is an endurance sport. A study conducted in 1960, tagged salmon in the Arctic Circle who swam 2,000 miles overall
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v195/n4846/abs/1951122a0.html
� Determine the impact of every action (Cost Impact due to No-Go
Decisions, Reduction in # of defects attributed to requirements change or missing requirements, Reduction in average age (time to closure) of defects etc.)
� Measure the impact in financial terms
� Cost prevented is revenue earned : establish that cost
savings > cost of prevention
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Protect yourself from en route mortality: Invest in sustaining QA practices
� Changing organizations is never easy – answer the “what’s in it for me!” question
� When you can’t defeat them, join them! – Market the value of your QA department (Lunch n learns, Social Media)
� Prevent fall back to old ways – allocate team members to focus on sustaining practices
� Make change inclusive – take your partners along
Appendix
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Salmon Rivers: continuous improvement areas
where we never stop swimming
Requirements Management
Minding entry and exit criteria
Root Cause Analysis
Metrics and Measurement
Dev-Ops
Test Data Strategy
Risk based testing
BVM Sample