Paul Gerrard
Gerrard Consulting, UKPaul Gerrard is a consultant, teacher, author, webmaster, programmer, tester, conference speaker, rowing coach and publisher. He has conducted consulting assignments in all aspects of software testing and quality assurance, specialising in test assurance. He has presented keynote talks and tutorials at testing conferences across Europe, the USA, Australia, South Africa and occasionally won awards for them.
Educated at the universities of Oxford and Imperial College London, he is the Principal of Gerrard Consulting Limited, the host of the UK Test Management Forum and a business coach for Enterprising Macclesfield. He was the Programme Chair for the 2014 EuroSTAR conference in Dublin and for the 2017 ExpoQA conference in Madrid.
In 2010 he won the EuroSTAR Testing Excellence Award and in 2013 he won the inaugural TESTA Lifetime Achievement Award. He won the ISTQB Testing Excellence Award in 2018.
Transforming to New Test and Assurance Approaches
Organisations used to slower rates of change are adopting new approaches of Agile, DevOps, and Continuous Delivery to achieve more rapid rates of systems change. The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is one approach to transforming to an Agile organisation, but companies are finding the transition from enterprise software development to agile approaches requires more than a process change. The roles of testing and assurance professionals especially, are usually poorly defined particularly where companies are attempting to shift testing activities to the left.
In this talk, Paul will set out the problems faced by less-agile organisations who are trying to implement agile software practices and identify three areas of transformation that are key to successful delivery:
Agile transformation in software delivery teams does not automatically fit the culture of non-agile organisations. Paul suggests how test and assurance practitioners adapt to help this transition succeed.
Andy Redwood
Redwood Associates Software, UKAndy is a senior testing practitioner managing global test teams to deliver pragmatic, strategic solutions. He works all over the world, currently for a large investment bank.
Andy also has a duty to integrate the corporate test strategy, aligning it with business objectives, strategic architecture, and life-cycle processes to deliver tangible benefits both onshore and offshore. Andy has lead teams that have saved over £30M in a year through removing diversity across departments and subsidiaries, inter-department process, commercial inefficiency and geographic or cultural differences, not just for testing activities, but for the greater corporate good.
Andy has a personal industry profile and is a regular public speaker at international conferences. He was Chair of the UK ISEB International standards Panel in 2003/4, the UK representative to the International Board in 2003. In 2004 he founded the ISEB UK Executive Committee at the request of the Chief Executive of the British Computer Society.
Andy was awarded the EuroSTAR Award for outstanding contribution to the Software Testing Industry in Europe, in December 2005, following a previous nomination in 2003.
What needs to be in place to benefit from automation in an Agile world?
This presentation will focus on :
A look at some case studies of how some organisations have automated:
