| | December 20199CIOReviewin their jobs. The results? They fixed issues earlier and earlier. We scrutinized the requirements more closely. There was an understanding that the time spent to identify a missed requirement now prevented project delays in the future. We identified dependencies to prevent future blocks in the schedule.Agile for the win: I've been through a couple of adoptions of agile at different companies. It's easy to start an agile shop. It's far harder to createasmooth working agile shop. In the beginning, it makes sense to executives; retool their teams to develop smaller packets of code and release it more often. However, getting across the concept of "give and take" is much harder. Leaders quickly start to wonder if they made the right choice when their "must-have" item is scheduled behind three other higher priority "must-haves." Get a coach in to train the executives and make sure they are on board. There will be some rough spots but you will become a more productive team that is delivering code more quickly. Fix #2: The Companywent agile and refactored our old requirements as features, stories, and tasks. QA was involved in the planning stage earlier than it had ever been. They reviewed stories and gained an understanding of the expectations of the product owners, and they provided estimates for testing. An equal seat at the table meant that all sides had an equal voice. That development fix that might only take 10-minutes may have 25 different testing scenarios and take half a day. Estimates became better than ever and the team got faster but more challenges loomed ahead.Regression takes how long?!?! Automation tools allow QA to take repetitive, manual tasks and create scripts to execute them much faster and more accurately than testers could. These scripts come with some overhead; you needed people with the skill to write and maintain the scripts, you need a prioritized list of scenarios you want to automate and you have to convince people why not everything should or even could be automated. Lastly, it's going to take time to complete. Fix #3: In the beginning, manual regression scenarios took the entire 14-person team two weeks to execute. Automation was the next logical step in the journey, and we set out with a goal to reduce manual regression time by 75%. We hired an Automation lead, who built a regression framework in Selenium. While that went on, the rest of the team documented all the scenarios, identified what could and should be automated. In about a year, we had created scripts that covered about 80% of the regression scenarios. We were now able to execute in a few hours what used to take weeks. Manual regression dropped from 1120 hours to 80 hours or just a couple of days for the team. What's Next? With the advent of new methodologies, DevOps, AI, BDD, the next phase centers around further shortening the time to market by moving the testing even further left into the development space. It's shaping up to be another wild ride, but that's why we love it.
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