Atomic Talk Title: Don’t test hard, test smart – How to achieve both high speed and improved quality in engineering teams

In this talk, I’d like to cover the trap of testing harder, which leads to a choice between speed or quality and the virtuous cycle of testing smarter, which leads to both speed and quality.
Testing harder often makes people think they must choose speed and sacrifice quality or improve quality and forfeit speed. In the trap of testing harder, I will detail how we stay late to get more done or take shortcuts by skipping review sessions or cutting testing. I’ll describe how they appear to speed up delivery in the short term, but in the long term, they lead to burnout, unmaintainable systems and longer delivery cycles.
In the virtuous cycle of testing smarter, I’ll detail how through improved collaboration, we can identify bottlenecks to delivery and alleviate them through experimentation. Testing smarter will, in the short term, appear to limit your ability to deliver at speed or quality, but in the long term ends up giving you more of both.

Talk Takeaways

• 1. Develop a shared understanding of what testing hard and testing smart is.
• How to identify when you’re testing hard and testing smart.
• How to use the DORA key metrics to create a shared understanding of speed and quality.