Test automation is extremely crucial in adoption of an agile delivery. However, it can take one for a ride, if the approach is not correct. In this sensational, heart throbbing, experience report, we'll share our story of how we turned around an inefficient, expensive automation style to lean, efficient style. In addition to sharing a real-world example, we'll also share some of the key challenges we faced and how we solved them. If you are convinced about the Testing Pyramid, but are struggling to invert it, then this session is for you.

Business Impact:

  Earlier Defect Detection - Higher test coverage at Unit/Intermediate layers lead to earlier defect detection. Reduced number of issues found on higher test environments/Production. Reduced cost of defect fixing.

  Reduced maintenance cost - UI tests are fragile and costlier to maintain Vs backend tests. No of changes in services layer are comparatively less.

  Reduced test execution time - Backend tests are much faster. Almost 7-10  times faster than UI Tests - improved build certification time.

  Test feedbacks are naturally distributed across layers of application. Test feedbacks are more pin pointed/ granular.

This is an extremly simple topic with a very complex answer. I have spent last 3 years experimenting and working with lot of people to understand what happens to the so called Manager role in Agile world. With a self organizing, empowered team, does Manager still have a role? Do you shelve these senior people who drove all your deliverables in the past for your company? Do you just let go the technical expertize these people bring along?

The research information around the experiment and results will be shared and am very positive that this will help lot of organizations move forward with great benefits. We will see how certain gaps that are created with introduction of Agile can be solved through these senior professionals. At the same time teams don't need to compromize or business doesn't need to compromize on new found agility by adopting any of the Agile practices.

The very next discussion that I will touch base as part of this presentation is the role of Project Leads. Many Leads resist movement to Agile because they feel their growth will now be stagnated. Is this true? It is again an interesting data set captured by talking to Leads in waterfall world and understanding what they really aspire for.

Looking forward to sharing my insights with real implementation and resulting data that I'm sure each of you will benefit from.

As designed for use, Scrum works well for small co-located teams, cross functional teams. As the popularity of Scrum starting growing, more and more companies started adopting Scrum with mixed results. But overall, the trend has been increasing. Off late, big enterprises have also started adopting agile for their business needs and building complex products. In a recent study, the number of enterprise customers adopting scrum has doubled in last 2 years and they have used distributed scrum on large programs. So, the question is, can agile scale beyond small and co-located teams and what challenges could be there?

This presentation talks about our experience of implementing scrum on a large program, the challenges of scaling scrum and how to overcome these challenges.