Good engineering practices and fail-fast, iterative, low-ceremony processes help achieve team level agility. They are necessary but not sufficient to scale agility across the IT organization. In this talk, I'll address what else is needed and why. In particular, I'll address:

1. Why plan-driven IT projects are a bad idea why we need value-driven projects instead
2. Why a matrix org is a bad idea for IT and why we need cross-functional teams instead
3. Why IT budgeting needs to change from being project-based to being team-capacity based

The key objectives of Organizations is to provide / derive value from the products / services they offer. To achieve this, they need to be able to deliver their offerings in the quickest time possible, and of good quality!
In such a fast moving environment, CI (Continuous Integration) and CD (Continuous Delivery) are now a necessity and not a luxury!

There are various practices that Organizations and Enterprises need to implement to enable CD. Testing (automation) is one of the important practices that needs to be setup correctly for CD to be successful.

Testing in Organizations on the CD journey is tricky and requires a lot of discipline, rigor and hard work. In Enterprises, the Testing complexity and challenges increase exponentially.

In this session, I am sharing my vision of the Test Strategy required to make successful the journey of an Enterprise on the path of implementing CD.

A project can face varied challenges through its life, foreseen and otherwise - runaway scope, high defect volumes, depressed velocity, and many more. Addressing many of these first requires recognition of the problem and then action from one or more sets of project stakeholders. Telling the story with simple visuals can be a very powerful way to articulate a challenge (the what), the potential root causes (the why) and the options available to fix it (the now-what). Teams typically already track a lot of data related to throughput, quality, scope and cost. Creative use of this data combined with simple, hand-crafted visuals can be much more effective than hundreds of bullet points. In this hands-on workshop, you get to exercise your visual thinking and visual communication skills. We introduce some simple visual thinking techniques like Look-See-Imagine-Show, and then let you apply them in a project simulation, so that you can practice hand-rolling simple visuals that speak volumes (no fancy tools needed!).

We do have test pyramid in our project to gain confidence on the code we will be delivering. We have also smoke tests, which will give us quick feedback. Still I'm saying Automate all the things!

What??

Well, yes! In agile world, there is a theme of ruthless automation. But in my opinion, we don’t push this principle nearly enough.

In this talk, I will share some of my expereinces and some interesting things which we never thought we could automate. Yes, We can automate everything!

At the BEGINNING Of the project: Yay!! Lets automate and cover all test scenarios!! Lets work towards increasing the test coverage !!

After 1 year: Regression suite is too bulky!! I can't maintain it anymore!! Its too flaky!! 

Does this conversation ring a bell? Well, this is a common scenario in projects. The UI test automation starts as a saftey net and then becomes a trap net! 

Heavy Functional tests layer → Long execution time → Low confidence → Problem of Maintainence

This talk will address these problems in an Agile project. Some solutions that worked in our team. How working as a Team would help prevent these problem?