To Transform Testing

There is no doubt that our long lived testing narrative is under pressure. To continue to bring business value, both the IT field and testing is transforming to be about proactive business enabling.

The IT domain is currently buzzing with the word “IT transformation” – the idea that IT services should be more about “inspire, challenge and transform the digital businesses“. That it should be less about delivering IT products and artifacts and more about enabling digital business outcomes. Even for testing – it should be less about a product/service, and more about business necessity.

Stop focusing on the things that bug people, and dare to do both IT and testing smarter and more business focused from the start. Build Quality in – smarter from start. That goes for IT services as a whole, and definitely also for the testing activities.

What can you do to transform your testing? I have three areas:

Discuss Business Strategy

Learn Wardley mapping – and use it like Chris McDermott to create context specific maturity models with Wardley Maps informed by Cynefin. Use the mapping to Broaden the scope of the system under test.

Align with the Business Strategy

Leading Quality [Cummings-John, Peer 2019] has a whole chapter on “Align your team to your company growth metric“. Consider if the company you work for is driven by Attention, Transaction or Productivity metrics, and arrange your test activities accordingly.

Dare to Deliver in New Ways

We are usually talk so much about optimizing the (IT and testing) delivery, that we forget other ways to be innovative and provide business enabling. One way could be to dare use new technology like RPA or a HoloLens to support tedious tasks in testing – to use an existing product to something new. Another approach to actually test “all the things” that matter or to apply testing to IT outside the realm of application delivery.

To Transform Testing I will discuss, align and dare so that test solutions can be proactive business enablers – (not only achieve shippable quality).

Mapping Mondays – Pioneers, Settlers, Town Planners