| | JUNE 20219CIOReviewtesters and faced high expectations for more automation, and so it wasclear that increasing the number of people who could automate testing was a key goal. We saw threeroads to get there:· Release the manual testers and hire new automation engineers· Upskill manual testers so they can automate· A hybrid approach of hiring automation engineers combined with an upskilling programTaking the first road mightseemeasy or leave some with a false impression that it would have allowed us to begin immediately. The cost of releasing experienced testers is losing years of domain and testing expertise with a team that has a deep understanding of our business and applications. The secondroadalso had challenges as it can be slower to upskill than hire, and not all manual testers are good candidates for upskilling. We choose the third path as we believed, in addition to onboarding new talent, that upskilling our manual testerswould result in a broader skill set on the team with a greater chance of long-term success.The Upskilling PlanAlmost five years ago when we made decision to include an upskilling program within our testing organization, we developed a phased implementation approach. The first phase entailed upskilling our testers with automation skills. The second phase provided tools to enable non-technical testers to contribute to automation. We launched our test automation upskilling program as a pilot with 25% of ourmanual testers. They included junior and senior testers with different experience levels and roles.The key features of the program included:· A senior stakeholder as program sponsor· 12 ­ 24-month customized learning plan tailored for each individual based on skill, experience, and corporate title· Mentors that were assigned to each candidate· Defined goalsto enable both the mentee's and mentor's success· Expectations for the commitment required from participants· A common set of exit criteriafor "graduation"A key component of our communication to the team wasdemonstrating respect and appreciationof current skills and reinforcing how the program supplements those skills, it doesn't deem them irrelevant. Wehand-selected each person to be part of the pilot, but also madeit clear that they could drop out at anytime. This helped make team members feel comfortable participating in the program. ResultsOur pilot was successful and is a program we continue to leverage. Only 5% of candidates have dropped from the program and 95% have remained with us as test automation engineers. We also saw teamswho were historically hesitant to be in the program become interested having seen theircolleagues' success.SummaryThe combination of our recruitment and upskilling efforts have put us in the position to achieve our optimal automation levels later this year. In addition to achieving our financial automation goals, increasing automation levels across our key applications has the added benefit of de-risking the change process by reducing production issues and increasing agility by making it more cost effective to put in smaller more frequent changes.Just as important, we havehighlymotivated teams that are gaining new and empowering skills. They feel valued and are appreciativeofBBH for enabling this professional growth. As the pendulum swings towards test automation, firms run the risk of being more interested in automating tests than understanding if the right things are being testedGerold Rajesh
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