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 ∙ sqeinfo@sqe.com ∙ 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.

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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