Tom Churchwell
IT Director
Cengage Learning
location_on United States
Member since 7 years
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Tom Churchwell
Specialises In (based on submitted proposals)
Call me "TC"
Military roots and a career in aviation provide me an eclectic backdrop to the professional world. Paralleling my 20 year military career with a civilian career in Information Technology, I have helped organizations tackle design and business challenges in a wide variety of cultures and environments. I get jazzed helping create high performing self-organizing teams. I enjoy people and the challenges associated with executing on high profile projects.
I also enjoy waterskiing, golf, flying and hanging out with family and friends.
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Agile QA
60 Mins
Talk
Intermediate
Agile practices, emphasizing individual interaction, customer collaboration, working software and adaptability have transformed software delivery. Ironically, many QA organizations have dodged the agile bullet and remain unchanged. Developers still rely on QA to test for them after development is done. They still wait to throw it over the wall to QA after they've finished some discrete functionality and the tradition of keeping QA out of the team rooms lives on.In another twist of irony, QA is complicite in the conspiracy. We resist the imperitive to learn how to automate. We continue to congregate together instead of dispersing into the team rooms and we have not learned how to effectively say "No" when the organization slips on dates and tries to compress the time available to conduct testing.Defects are still getting through and the impact affects not only QA, but the Dev teams and many other parts of our organizations. We are giving the naysayers ammunition to say "we tried it, but agile isn't working". The "evidence of it working just isn't there" they say, and QA, done this way, is helping them make their case. As Pogo once said, "We have met the enemy and he is us".This session will explore how QA needs to learn new skiils and adopt new practices to become an integral part of the Solution Delivery Team(s). We will look at Quality Metrics, Test Automation and the Testing Pyramid and explore some of the new skills QA team members need to learn in order to become a more integral part of the tight feedback loops necessary in an agile world. -
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Agile Excellence In & Out of the Team Room
45 Mins
Talk
Intermediate
Aristotle said "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit". Agile as well, is a habit and a skill; a journey more than a destination. Both in the agile team rooms as well as through other affected parts of the organization, agile is a serious game changer and it all starts with continuous learning and improvement.
Product Team Research Studies are showing significant growth in agile adoption beyond the technology teams. As some organizations work to extend and gain the benefits of agile beyond the team rooms they are finding that there are both great benefits and great challenges. Every organization is different with differing goals and objectives ans knowing how to map agile practices to those goals can help you and your organization to iteratively focus on practices that will gain the most alignment and resonate most readily with your expanding cross-functional teams.
This session will explore the organizational structures that help faciliate agile adoption and growth. We will also look at the iterative team level practices that help a team continuously align with the business and achieve the levels of excellence that are needed to fight off the organizational anti-bodies that will try to twart your agile adoption efforts.
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