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Thursday, October 3, 2013 - 1:30pm - 2:30pm
Test Management
T13

Swimming with the Salmon: Lessons in Moving Quality Upstream

Having difficulties getting your organization to recognize the value of QA? Is your “salmon team” losing to currents that impede continuous improvement and strategic planning? Colleen Kirtland and Harish Krishnankutty share their two-year uphill struggle to elevate QA to the position of trusted business partner. Move QA upstream before testing begins by aligning requirements to a business capability model (BCM). Translate the BCM model into key implementation assets with story maps. Before delivering test execution, swim like salmon to frame testing services by connecting day-to-day operational metrics to higher level business value metrics. Partner with your product and/or development teams to inject measurable quality gates upstream in the delivery lifecycle. Learn about the evolution of merging service level management (e.g., ITIL processes) with upstream QA, test, and solution delivery. Create a fun, vibrant team culture of uphill swimmers who advocate formal quality standards. Fight to fund and sustain a multi-year quality strategy while still meeting customer demands.

Colleen Kirtland, The Capital Group

Industry veteran Colleen Kirtland is passionate about QA and the role of technology in helping to effect positive social change. As technology transforms the way we do things, there is a need to include not only solution quality but also human factors and organizational behavior as aspects of measuring quality. As an evangelist of proven quality practices, Colleen has served both as a leader and individual contributor in multiple companies and industries. She currently works as enterprise QA practice lead at The Capital Group Companies.

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Harish Krishnankutty, Infosys Limited

Currently leading the test consulting practice at Infosys Limited, Harish Krishnankutty has spent more than a decade evangelizing, advocating, and championing QA and testing in large business organizations. Harish has scripted, directed, and taken the roles of pilot, co-pilot, coach, foot soldier, and occasional villain (for the quality averse) in several successful—and not-so-successful—QA transformation stories played at banks, manufacturers, asset managers, and apparel retailers, to name a few.

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