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

Testing is overated. Let's correct that statement - "Manual Testing is overrated". In this this talk, I plan to take you on whirlwind tour of why an Agile outfit does not need manual testing at all and how to get fantastic Quality Assurance without manual testing.

In this talk - I outline a agile process with a difference - everyone is a developer and a tester. However, there is no dedicated QA people. In fact, this process does not require anyone other than the developers and one process/product owner.

Development using a central repository like Github that is integrated with a Continuous Integration service (like Travis, CircleCI or Semaphore) and further integrated with a Code Quality checker like Code Climate or Pull Review is part of the automation trick. Then comes the development processes like pull request between branches (enabling peer code review) and Automated Deployment to a staging server.

Finally, the pixel perfection or meeting product specificaiton via Project Management tools (which are integrated with the Code repository) gives the product owner (or the client) complete confidence in not just the functionality but also the quality of the code. 

This approach can be applied to evolving products too and I discuss how to work in short sprints that always keep changing and guarantee that "The product owner gets the money's worth and the development team gets their works worth!".

Traditionally, in software development, user experience (UX) wasn't valued as much as developing of the software itself. But this has changed rather radically. However, creating an enriching user experience in an agile fashion is still challenging. Most of the agile engineering practices in use are around building software but seldom address UX. When building a product in an agile fashion, UX in an incremental fashion becomes important.

In this talk, we will present our experience of creating UX in an incremental fashion for a virtual wallet. We will also talk about the different challenges we faced such as, educating various stakeholders on the value of incremental UX, building collaboration between developers and experience designers and abstracting design components, along with the solutions we devised to tackle these challenges.

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 order for these organizations to to understand the quality / health of their products at a quick glance, typically a team of people scramble to collate and collect the information manually needed to get a sense of quality about the products they support. All this is done manually.

So in the fast moving environment, where CI (Continuous Integration) and CD (Continuous Delivery) are now a necessity and not a luxury, how can teams take decisions if the product is ready to be deployed to the next environment or not?

Test Automation across all layers of the Test Pyramid is one of the first building blocks to ensure the team gets quick feedback into the health of the product-under-test.

The next set of questions are:
    •    How can you collate this information in a meaningful fashion to determine - yes, my code is ready to be promoted from one environment to the next?
    •    How can you know if the product is ready to go 'live'?
    •    What is the health of you product portfolio at any point in time?
    •    Can you identify patterns and do quick analysis of the test results to help in root-cause-analysis for issues that have happened over a period of time in making better decisions to better the quality of your product(s)?

The current set of tools are limited and fail to give the holistic picture of quality and health, across the life-cycle of the products.

The solution - TTA - Test Trend Analyzer

TTA is an open source product that becomes the source of information to give you real-time and visual insights into the health of the product portfolio using the Test Automation results, in form of Trends, Comparative Analysis, Failure Analysis and Functional Performance Benchmarking. This allows teams to take decisions on the product deployment to the next level using actual data points, instead of 'gut-feel' based decisions.

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?

Given you have a PRODUCT to test

When you start testing it

Then STOP testing it

And start USING it

In this talk I would like to address how important it is for the whole team to use to product to see the good, the bad and the ugly side of the product you are building which are otherwise unknown to the team until they go live.

As a tester in an agile model of software development team, I felt the need to have an automated mechanism of getting fast feedback on my growing application. This talk is to share my learnings on the set up, configuration and various processes followed in this automation. The benefits of having a CI and automated test runs, their set ups will be shown through a demo.