Virtually Speaking: Leading Distributed Test Teams

As a newly promoted quality assurance manager, Willie Smith assumed responsibility for a large application that allows UPS customers to ship packages worldwide. His team was distributed worldwide and had varying levels of automation experience, application knowledge, and QA processes in place. With the next deployment date only a few months away, Willie found that the testing side of the project was in trouble. To align the test team with project and company goals, he had to develop virtual training plans and implement new practices to deal with the host of issues he faced. One key step was to quickly select and implement new communication and collaboration tools for his distributed team and others to use. Willie shares how all the stakeholders pulled together, employing updated practices and new tools to pull off what some thought was a “mission impossible.” Come and listen to Willie’s story to learn how you can develop, train, lead, and manage virtual teams—large or small.