A strategy for testers in Continuous Delivery Context (DevOps)

1. Shift Left, Shift Right
and Improve the centre
A strategy for testers in a continuous delivery context
Augusto Gus Evangelisti

2. Why you should listen to an old man with
a pig on his t-shirt?

3. Warning: by the end of this talk you might
hate me

4. When did I think about doing a
talk on this?

5. What is CD?
“Continuous delivery (CD) is a
software engineering approach in
which teams produce software in
short cycles, ensuring that the
software can be reliably released at
any time. It aims at building, testing,
and releasing software faster and
more frequently.” - Wikipedia

6. What is CD?

7. Some myths
CD can work only for websites, it does not
work for complex things
CD can work only in non regulated
industries
Teams that do CD have very buggy
software

8. Myth #1 - CD can work only for
websites, it does not work for complex
systems

9. Myth #2 - CD can work
only in non regulated
industries

10. Myth #3 - Teams that do
CD have very buggy
software

11. Myth #3 - Teams that do
CD have very buggy
software

12. Discuss
Pick 2 people next to you and discuss
the answer to the question
“why do organisations use continuous
delivery?”
- 3 minutes

13. Benefits

14. Now let me tell you
my story

15. Caveat to my story
I will tell you the story of how we
transformed PaddyPower into a high
performing continuous delivery
organisation.
I will tell you what I learned from it.
I will not tell you “This is how you have to
do it”, but I hope you will find some of the
lessons I have learned useful for your
context. (Gus)

16. Let’s start from the
end

17. My first day in PP I saw
this

18. First thing that worked for
us
The industry calls it DEvOps

19. Quiz
had 8 teams with around 50 developers, 8 BAs, 8 POs a
How many testers did we have?

20. Answer
Acceptable answer #1: 3
Acceptable answer #2: 77
50 dev, 8 BAs, 8 POs, 8 Sister eng. and 3 Testers

21. Quality became the
priority for everybody

22. Testing activities shift

23. Shift Left activities
Reduce complexity
BDD
Test automation
Pair programming
Code reviews
Mob programming

24. More Shift Left
activities
Designing a lean product (Impact
Mapping/LeanUX)
Improve testability
Reduce multitasking through WIP
Design for resilience
Design for availability
Design for performance

25. Improve the centre
activities
Pair exploratory testing with developers

26. Shift Right activities
• Monitoring customers use of the
product
• Analysing customer’s feedback for
future products
• Canary releases

27. How did 3 testers
manage to do all this?

28. Communication
became more central
than ever
We needed to communicate with all sorts of
different people
We needed to gain people’s trust
We needed to understand different points
of view and expectations

29. What skills did I work
on?
Active Listening
Empathy
Infulencing

30. Active Listening
Listen for what people have to say, do not
prepare an answer while somebody is
talking to you.
Use positive body language and reinforce
the conversation by paraphrasing (or
restating) what you just heard

31. Empathy
Perspective taking
Refrain from judgement
Recognising emotions
Sharing our acknowledgement

32. Empathy
Can we rejoice for
other people’s
success?

33. Influencing others, let’s
learn from salesmen!

34. The science in context is
Psychology

35. I like these 2, let’s try
Reciprocity
Consensus

36. Collaboration was
vital

37. Testing community of
practice

38. I said “at least” one

39. Can you do it?

40. To finish
Deliver fast
Deliver often
but most of all
HAVE FUN DOING IT!
Thank you!