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Elisabeth HockePrincipal Agile Tester at FlixMobility

Keynote Speech

Growing an Experiment-driven Quality Culture

You know your own product team needs to improve when it comes to testing and quality, yet you are not sure how to tackle this challenge? Many teams out there feel the need to grow a quality mindset, considering this to be a major stumbling block in their environments. At my current company, tech leadership had a clear mission: improve the testing and quality culture of our product teams by leveling up knowledge, skills and practices. The problem: how to get there?

Experiments to the rescue! In a complex environment like ours, no one could tell what would work, so we had to try things out. I designed an experiment to increase transparency, raise awareness, and especially drive experimentation in individual teams to grow a quality culture. Together with a newly formed working group, I supported four pilot teams to design, run and evaluate their own measurable experiments in their own specific context. These teams tried various approaches like exploratory testing, pair and ensemble testing, or documenting architectural decisions.

In this talk I will share our lessons learned, the outcome and impact of these experiments, and what influenced the next experiments to try. Get inspired by our continuous journey towards making experiments a part of team culture across the company!

Takeaways:

  • Understand why small, frugal experiments are crucial in complex environments
  • Learn how to design your own measurable experiments, in your team or globally
  • Get tips on how to run and evaluate experiments
  • Gain insights on how to learn from experiment results and decide on next steps
  • Start a movement towards an experiment-driven quality culture

About Elisabeth Hocke

Having graduated in sinology, Lisi fell into agile and testing in 2009 and has been infected with the agile bug ever since. She’s especially passionate about the whole-team approach to testing and quality as well as the continuous learning mindset behind it. Building great products which deliver value together with great people is what motivates her and keeps her going. She received a lot from the community; now she’s giving back by sharing her stories and experience. She tweets as @lisihocke and blogs at www.lisihocke.com. In her free time you can either find her in the gym running after a volleyball, having a good time with her friends or delving into games and stories of any kind.