Establishing Modern QA practices In Lean Startups

Please log in to watch this conference skillscast.

Being a first time speaker, her motivation behind this talk is to share how you establish modern QA practices in a delivery focused and ever-changing organisations like start-ups; where budgets are tight with loads of technical debt, where failure is almost guaranteed if you don’t break the rules. The key to establishing a successful QA function in such a dynamic environment is not to attempt a big bang change by introducing new advanced QA processes. An iterative approach is required. Understanding what needs to improve in the existing QA function, to begin with, bringing people along and explaining the ‘why’ is important. Solving simple little problems helps in building trust, for example, the developers found it hard to release to production, so an emphasis on the deployment pipeline helped.

What should people expect to take away from this:

• Taking an iterative approach when introducing a change by focussing on a problem and making small wins is critical.
• Building quality assurance, TDD, BDD, ATDD in a dynamic fast pace startup by stabilising the QA function first, by fixing the culture, communication and collaboration, before making changes.
• Automation is fundamental when it comes to quality assurance. How to establish automation in fast paced environments where requirements change frequently.
• It’s all about having that balance what to automate and when to automate. Knowing different levels of testing (unit, integration, component, SIT) and adding tests to these levels will increase the quality coverage across the code.
• Talk about growing with the organisation and addressing new and exciting challenges around establishing a QA function in a squad framework, when you have chosen to accelerate change.
• Validating the changes that you have made while establishing Quality Assurance and improving as you go along.
• If it doesn’t work, don’t be afraid to change it. Learn from your failure and move on.
• How QA can get involved at the beginning of the SDLC and reduce risks, save time and money.

Whether you are working at the enterprise level in an international business as Isha was when she started this journey or at dynamic fast-paced start-up like where she is now, you'll find this talk pertinent, relevant and engaging.

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE:

• Certified Large-Scale Scrum Practitioner: Principles to Practices (In Person) with Ben Maynard (in London on 26th - 28th June 2023)
• Certified Large-Scale Scrum for Executives with Ben Maynard (in London on 12th - 13th October 2023)
• Business Agility powered by Product Strategy (SkillsCast recorded in November 2022)
• Mastering Your Inner Demons as Product Managers (SkillsCast recorded in November 2022)