How I helped testers with a backlog of half a year to catch up in about 9 weeks, making customers happy and not allowing a backlog to grow.
Speaker
Niels Malotaux
Agenda
6:00pm - Start of presentation
7:00pm - Estimated Finish of the presentation
7:00pm - Estimated start of the BCS Quality SG AGM
8:00pm - Estimated Finish
Synopsis
This is about a real case of too many developers feeding too few testers, causing a testing backlog of half a year, with many angry customers waiting for too long for solutions to their problems. One senior tester just had left the company. There was only one senior and one junior tester left. They were facing this huge backlog of work and didn’t know where to start.
We will show how empowerment of the testers, appropriate planning, and involvement of the developers allowed the testers to catch up in about 9 weeks, systematically making customers happy one by one along the way. The senior tester learnt how to plan the work of the testers effectively and efficiently in sync with the developers, so that there were no backlogs ever since.
Trust by customers who were in the process of abandoning the supplier was restored causing turnover to grow enormously since.
We will first show how we used Evolutionary Planning techniques in this particular case.
Then we will discuss in more general terms the elements of this planning technique.
The answer to the question “Who is the customer of Testing?” usually causes quite a shock to most of the audience. However, this is usually a shock of recognition.
About the speaker
Niels Malotaux is an independent international Project Coach and expert in optimizing organizational, management, project, and team performance.
He has some 45-year experience in designing electronic and software systems, at Philips Electronics, 20 years leading an electronic systems design company, and since 1998 helping projects to deliver Quality on Time: delivering the Right Results at the Right Time, enabling customer success.
From time to time he still develops electronic products for clients, which allows him to understand the pitfalls of developers first hand.
Since 2001 he taught and coached well over 400 projects and teams in 40+ organizations in the Netherlands, Belgium, China, Germany, Ireland, India, Israel, Japan, Poland, Romania, Serbia, South Africa, the UK and the US, which led to a wealth of experience in which approaches work better and which work less well in real practice.
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This event is hosted by: Quality specialist group
Supported by: Business Change specialist group, Dorset branch and Hampshire branch
