Talk: Faster Delivering Teams? Kill the test column!
Speakers directory
Speaker:
Jitesh Gosai
Talk description
Title:
Faster Delivering Teams? Kill the test column!
Short synopsis:
The "In Test" column and it's neighbour "Waiting for Test" seem like a good idea to have on most team boards. But what a lot of teams don't realise is that this actually leads to teams having more work in progress and less work actually being finished. The best way to solve this? Remove the Test columns. I'll talk about what issues the Test columns causes, why removing is actually good for teams and how to do it.
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Long synopsis (optional):
A lot of development teams typically have a "In Test" column on their boards to indicate when things are being tested. Some even have “Waiting for Test” columns this way the Test team know what work to pick up next and are never left idle. This also allows the Dev team to keep busy while Testers are verifying the system is fit for purpose. Which all seems like a good idea but what a lot of teams don't realise is this is actually leading them to have more work in progress rather then focusing on finishing work. Not only that but a lot of other issues too: - Encouraging inner team silos - Pushing testing towards the end of development - Testing becoming the bottleneck within the team - Slowing down the feedback loop for the whole team The usual solution to these problems is to add more Testers to do the work faster or to use automation in an attempt to replace the work of the testers. Both of which have their subsequent problems. But there is a simpler solution. Remove the Test column and refocus the team on finishing work rather than keeping busy by starting new work. Now you could just simply remove the columns and let the team figure it out. This could work or you could tackle the problem systematically by using the ideas from Theory of Constraints. How? By using the 5 focusing steps to identify the bottlenecks in your testing process, focusing your efforts to eliminate them and continuing the process until you no longer need the "In Test Column". In this talk I'll explain why the "In Test" column cause these problems and how to apply Theory of Constraints to solve them. Takeaways: - How to talk about why the in test column is a bad idea for development teams - Why we ended up with the in test column and it's sibling waiting for test - How to systematically move away from the in test column iteratively as a team ** Additional supporting evidence - not to be used in external publications. ** The reason why I think this talk will be well received is that a blog post I published back in August 2018 (https://www.jitgo.uk/in-test-column/) has received just under 1500 hits from around the world and still regularly brings traffic to my site. I think I've struck a cord positively within the Agile and test communities. But what I didn't detail was how you actually do it. This is what I'd like to address with this talk. This talk is also a good way to introduce teams to TOC thinking and how they can apply the ideas to other parts of their processes to find efficiencies that actually improve their time to deliver business and end user value .
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