"Transforming towards Agile Leadership – Success stories and lessons learnt on Testing in a distributed Agile Environment"

Archana Ramesh, Senior Quality Engineering Manager, Yahoo!

Introduction

Keeping in mind the increasing demand for agility, one needs to understand what the key parameters and mindset shifts needed to be successful in an agile development environment are. This interactive workshop, which also involves a lot of brainstorming and contribution from participants, addresses the above, with an emphasis on what this specifically implies to a software testing organization. Key topics related to the “Goals” and “Culture” in an agile environment  are discussed in detail.

The workshop also covers Coaching and Mentoring the Distributed Team and asks the question – How Agile Do We Need to Be?  It also discussed how one can build winning Agile teams.

Focussing on Testing challenges in a distributed agile environment, the tutorial attempts to throw light on the below aspects:

• What makes distributed agile harder than co-located teams?
• What can we do to circumvent the above?
• Information sharing / Communication best practices
• Development Infrastructure best practices
• Resourcing patterns
• NearShore / Onshore presence
• Role of testers in clarifying requirements
• Benefits of Test Driven Development
• Benefits of early automation
• Benefits of Group Tests and Product Demos

During the latter part of the tutorial the facilitator shares some success stories and lessons learned on testing in agile teams, as well as some preventive measures that arose from them and can be implemented in future projects.

Speaker Profile

Archana Ramesh, Senior Quality Engineering Manager, Yahoo!

Archana Ramesh is a Senior Quality Engineering Manager with Yahoo! in charge of quality for all Y! Small Business properties. She has focused for over 17 years building and coaching teams that develop processes, tools and automation needed to deliver software fast and with high quality. Prior to Yahoo!, she managed quality engineering for Platform and Infrastructure at Ariba for 6 years.

Archana has helped redefine the value-addition of Quality Engineering team in the overall Software Development process using Agile/Scrum techniques and continuous test automation as an effective vehicle to do so. She has varied experience in helping shift mindsets of large, traditional teams to being more flexible and adaptive. She holds a Masters degree in Information Technology and is a Certified Scrum Master. She has also spoken at Quality Conferences on the benefits of Agile techniques.