Darren Davie and I gave a talk to the Melbourne based Test Engineering Alliance Meetup on July 25th. This is the slide deck we used. The essence of our talk was about how diversity in practice, unified by values can make for a successful

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Featured Project:
Waterfront City, Melbourne, Australia | US $788M Value
Trusted by the world’s largest projects
How to be your own type of Agile
and be more successful
Test Engineering Alliance Meetup
Melbourne, July 2016
Craig Brown & Darren Davie

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• Who are we?
• What do we want to do tonight?
• Our Quality team
• The way we are organised
• The way we work
• Why this works
• What can you take away?
Agenda

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Why we do what we do…
Transform the way project teams work together.
Make the process fairer, easier and more efficient for everyone.
“
”
• Build 5 hospitals for the same price as 4
• Help iterate on design to make more
beautiful spaces and buildings to work and play in
• Less costly court cases where only the lawyers win
• Minimise conflict and stress on projects
• Help workers get home earlier to see their families

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And we have spread R&D globally…
9
San Fran
90+
Melbourne
7
Sydney
35+
Bangalore
46
offices
8
Dev
centres
200+
R&D staff
18
Munich
9
Duisburg
9
Paris
10
Nottingham
700+
Total staff

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Craig Darren

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• Who are we?
• What do we want to do tonight?
• Our Quality team
• The way we are organised
• The way we work
• Why this works
• What can you take away?
Agenda

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Tonight’s goals
• Show off our company
– we’re a great place to
work
• Share what we know –
we are part of the
community
• Get you guys to be as
good as you can be –
we are growing and
always looking to hire
• I want to be inspired
and motivated
• I want to know what
areas to focus on for
skills and knowledge
development
• I want to network
with great people and
advance my career

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• Who are we?
• What do we want to do tonight?
• Our Quality team
• The way we are organised
• The way we work
• Why this works
• What can you take away?
Agenda

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Australia India Europe and America
Satish Soudamini
Antony Ashok
Chetan Nikitha
Ravi Nagaraj
Bashkar Hemanlatha
Mahesh
Our QA Community
Darren Mei
Tim Scott
Lidjia Felix
Rishi Nigel
TBD
Cheyane Jill
Emmanuel Steven
Kerry Nabila
Constantin

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• Who are we?
• What do we want to do tonight?
• Our Quality team
• The way we are organised
• The way we work
• Why this works
• What can you take away?
Agenda

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* Approximately right – teams
change from time to time
depending on the jobs to be
done.
Our structure

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* Approximately right – teams
change from time to time
depending on the jobs to be
done.
Our structure

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• Who are we?
• What do we want to do tonight?
• Our Quality team
• The way we are organised
• The way we work
• Why this works
• What can you take away?
Agenda

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Spotify

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How people mistakenly implement agile
Heard a fantastic presentation from a conference in Finland Talks
about company culture and the Spotify model of tribes and things
like that what every one is going crazy abut these days.
His key message was that kind of organisation emerged because of
their company culture, just taking the organisation and pasting it
onto a company with a different culture is kind of never going to
work.
What would be good would be try and find a model that works with
a particular company culture or even better change the company
culture and find a model that works there. A lot of stuff people tend
to just copy and paste.
- Gojko Adzic

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Cargo Cults

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The way we work
Consistent
Behaviours and
Values
Simple
locally
customised
Processes
Methods and
Techniques
for the job at
hand

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The values

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The values
The Heart
of Agile

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Loosely similar processes
• Scrum… ish
• XP… ish
• Then… the differences
• Release cycles
• Regression testing
• Deployment processes
• Story sizes
• Roadmaps
• Story kick-off
• How we manage bugs 9Cards on wall, jira, nothing)

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What do our team boards look like?

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Bid Contender Hypotheses Notes
We ship when the
column tells us to
Epic backlogs trail
to the left

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Insights
Roadmap for
context
Dev Done = buffer
Explicit “Analysis”
column

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Catalyst (Scaling)
Model the work
No QA column
Different
handwriting on
cards

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Platform/Data Centres
Work planned by
time horizons
Streams/colours
Dependencies

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Customer comms
Test & Review
Break down the
backlog
Impediments

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BIM Digital board Each story has a
champion
Sprints have goals
to gove stories
context
Business
performance

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Solid Gold Dancers
Epics across the
top
Focus on
continuous
improvement
Funnel limits WIP
Multiple agendas

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Linking
Icons =WIP lmits
Blocked
Streams based on
pairs

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Core Aconex (Babylon)
Simple card names
As a user…
Multiple projects
Colour coded cards
Velocity

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Core Aconex (Babylon)
Pairs

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Field team
Blocked cards
brought forward
WIP Limits on
columns
Colour coded by
epic
Release truck
Multiple streams

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Login/Identity
Screen design
User research
Project Story map
Stories/Tasks
Testing cards

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Cost Out of the box Jira
Testing specific
card
Regression Testing
column

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Local Copy/Archives
Jira!
Very vanilla

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QA Test Automaton
Drop through the
hourglass

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QA regression
Icons for people
Tests done
Bugs found and
open

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Dev Done
(Kanban Buffer)
No QA
Column
3 month
windows
Content
publishingIt’s digital
It’s Lego!
It’s got a
funnel
3D board
Backlogs trail
to the left
Story/Task
breakdown
Regression
test column
Hourglass

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We surveyed our team

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Survey time
What is your top/most
important QA practice
(approaches, methods,
tools)?
If you had to drop one
current method or
practice it would be…
How often do you deliver
software?
Let’s do an activity

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What is your top3 important QA practices?
Favourites Responses
Mind maps 5
Exploratory Testing 5
Scrum 3
Manual test scripts 3
Jira 3
Continuous communication within team 3
Being agile 3
Automated Regression 3
Technical understanding of system 2
verify-act-verify 1
Tools 1
Test environment 1
Story acceptance criteria 1
Stake holder collaboration to validate 1
scenarios in kick-off 1
Release criteria 1
Regression risk of changes/additions 1
Recording conversation on story 1
Process 1
Prioritising and focus on task completion 1
planning meeting 1
Pairing 1
Kick-offs with Devs/UX/PO for acceptance
criteria 1
Improving and maturing test cases 1
Impact analysis 1
Functional understanding 1
Focusing on delivering value 1
Flexibility of QA practices 1
Feasibility analysis 1
Developer machine test before handover 1
developer collaboration 1
Determine what to automate 1
Cucumber-Watir 1
Convert Excel Test plans to GWT format 1
Common sense 1
bug report follow-up after regression testing 1
Bug prioritisation 1
Bug prevention 1
agile testing 1

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What would I drop? Responses
None 4
Reduce manual regression 3
I would never have to do that at Aconex 1
Documentation 1
Long production deployment time 1
Code changes during regression testing 1
timesheets 1
Dedicated automation team
every one should own it 1
we drop experiments that don't work 1
Testing only happy paths 1
Using tools other than Excel for test case maintenance 1
Manual sanity tests 1
Low level tests 1
Documentation of test cases 1
If you had to drop one current method or practice
it would be?

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How often do you deliver?
Frequency of delivery Responses
6 weekly and services within an hour 1
every completed change 1 hour to a couple of days 1
Daily/Almost daily 2
Fortnightly 1
3 delivers a month 2
When there is user value 2-3 weeks or before too many
changes to prevent unacceptable risk
2
4 weekly/Monthly 1
every 2 months 3
striving for bimonthly 1
Where do we deliver to?

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• Who are we?
• What do we want to do tonight?
• Our Quality team
• The way we are organised
• The way we work
• Why this works
• What can you take away?
Agenda

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The values
The Heart
of Agile

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Shu-Ha-Ri-Kokoro progression

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Key Focus Areas In Order Of Importance
• Company culture
• Team members & collaboration
• Your own personalized practices, techniques &
processes within the team
• Tools & automation within the team
People
Technology

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Key Points
• Collaborate, Deliver, Reflect, Improve
• Understand the basics: don’t copy someone else's practices
• If all the teams in your organisation are doing the same thing your organisation
is probably not very agile
• Following agile frameworks without following the Heart of Agile will not
leverage your full potential
• Don’t complicate things - simplify
• Have confidence to try new things
• Understand and reduce risk
• Quality is owned by everyone

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Featured Project:
Heera RD Phase-II Pipeline, Indian Ocean | US $200M Value
Trusted by the world’s largest projects
Q&A

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Yes, of course I want to know more!
Watch Dr Cockburn give an hour long talk in more depth on heart of Agile.
Click the picture for the talk and click here to read a summary article!