Abstracts

Ever tried herding cats? Currently, I find myself in the role of a full-time cat-herder. In October 2022, I took on the most challenging role of my career - introducing software testing in a large-scale digital transformation program. Some of the people involved did have some idea of testing – but everybody had a completely different perspective. Leading in such a diverse environment became a challenge, compounded by significant concurrent changes, including an ongoing agile transformation.

My mission seemed crystal clear: ‘introduce testing’ - and I had the freedom to shape it my way, as long as it was suitable for the company.
But what form was that shape going to take?  I started by creating strategies to identify common goals, implement guardrails, and provide a path for managing expectations. And this was the biggest failure to begin with! I did not consider the testers in their diversity well enough. Some knew a bit about testing and had previous experience. Others were content with checking the happy path. Still others had no time to learn anything new. None of them was genuinely interested in my testing strategy. To me, it felt like herding cats – knowing the intended direction while testers scattered in all directions, demanding diverse approaches. What now?

My team and I had to change the approach to keep the testing spirit high. We learned to emphasize the importance of patience, psychological skills and adaptability.  We learned to make sure that our efforts remained visible and didn’t get lost amongst the corporate sprawl. The challenges came thick and fast, and it became obvious we needed some allies. That's where the “test support crew” came in – they were our safety belt, coaching new testers and tending to their needs.
In this talk I’m going to share the journey with you: the highs, the lows, what we have learned, and what we plan to do next. This has been a challenging journey thus far, but the results are starting to materialize, such as such as people joining our trainings and beginning to take interest in the point of view of testers. Almost three years of experience have gone into this journey and I’m looking forward to sharing the not-so-great as well as the surprisingly awesome moments we had when introducing software testing into a diverse company and herding the cats to quality.