Break Silos, Build Chapters
As enterprises mature in their agile journey and move towards becoming more distributed cross-functional teams, the testing that was once done by a single central team has transformed into a distributed capability where testers are embedded within the agile teams. While this has many benefits, some potential challenges surface. When testers disperse across multiple teams they can start to feel isolated and collaboration with peers diminish. Duplication of tools and frameworks may emerge, transparency decreases and ways of working and practices become highly siloed and inconsistent. To solve the lack of connection, inspiration and knowledge-sharing, one solution is to work with testing chapters to connect testers into a shared context - a community. They provide a platform to share, organize skills and expertise as well as serve as a safe community of like minded people to share new ideas, test experimentations and receive feedback from peers. I will share our experiences in building these testing chapters, the opportunities they can provide to collaborate across teams, and the value they create. I'll share how we overcame challenges, how we used gamification to keep engagement high, and how we made the chapters fit into an enterprise-wide agile team structure.
Ashok Kumar
Ashok Kumar is the head of Quality Assurance & Engineering for Transunion Africa. In this position he leads Testing and Quality Assurance for the Africa region which enables Transunion to rollout innovative credit bureau solutions to our African customers at scale and with high quality. Ashok works with multiple agile teams within the company and coach them on the quality mind-set. Ashok has nearly 2 decades of experience in the testing domain across multiple industries such as financial services, retail, & credit bureau.