Agile2014

How can a single individual change how testing is done in a large, distributed organisation? (originally 8, 000+, now 70,000+) This is my story of how I implemented exploratory testing in a big company one step at a time. Working with small teams of 3-8 testers and progressing to division wide teams of 200+ testers. I provided opportunities for them to experience success and then capitalized on their passion to help promote the approach. By focusing on small steps and showing by doing, they were able to bring about great change.



The key elements of the talk discusses how I encouraged collaboration and empowered people to lead by example in their teams. I will provide tangible results of how this encouraged teams across the globe to take ownership of their own departmental training needs using me as support.



I will talk about the successes and the failures and what was learnt by this and how I am now moving forward and pushing into an even bigger organisation.



To help clarify I would classify myself as a 'change agent', who is a tester but with the remit by senior management to make testing more effective and efficient. Due to my experiences in software testing and my close links with the testing community it was felt by leadership teams within the organization to leverage my skills to promote the way testing was carried out and to radically change the mindset. Starting small meant working with small teams to start with and building up a team of evangelists in each country who could work with teams in their domains to improve their testing. The talk looks into how this was achieved and how we now have a network across the whole organization. with support from senior management.