Initiating changes within your organization when you’re not the leader isn’t easy, but it’s far from impossible. This session will include real life lessons from over 18 years in QA in how to influence change when you’re not the boss. Learn how to lead from the middle of your organization and stand out from the crowd. Testing software can seem like a never-ending process with every new feature or bug fix revealing new issues, learn the techniques to influence how these issues are dealt with. Using principles from John Maxwell, Jane will help you see how to lead from anywhere in your organization.

Learn ways to:

• Influence changes in your organization, in order to improve quality in both the products and the team.
• Eliminate the blame game from post mortems and develop key learning’s instead.
• Use past events to forge new process.
• Learn how to build relationships all round you.
• Express the risks or issues to different individuals to get results.
• Meet the challenges of being a test professional and the principles for leading down, up and across, regardless of your position in the organization.

Managing a successful site and trying to keep it bug-free is a never-ending process. Every release brings with it new challenges—trying to nail down a bug that’s causing havoc for your customers, quickly creating patch solutions, and strategizing ways to fight fires with as little down time as possible. If you don’t juggle resources correctly, the stress of managing a live site will take a toll on your team. Jane Fraser will share her lessons from over 12 years of experience in the online QA world. She will share tools and best practices so you can reduce risk, mitigate disaster, and meet customer needs all while keeping your team happy in a hectic environment. Jane will walk you techniques to make sure the right people are available at the right time, the different roles you’ll need, and the use of wiki’s, chat rooms, war rooms and call bridges to keep the communications flowing. Follow the path of a production issue from identification, reproduction, risk assessment to determine when or if it should be addressed, the patching process used and the checks and balances used to ensure the safest path towards fixing the issue. Listen as she discusses some of the bad fixes that have lead to her current processes. Most of Jane’s techniques are appropriate with all types of online websites and services. Find out how to avoid some of the pitfalls of the online world.

Main Message:

• Planning for the worst
• Scheduling techniques to reduce burnout
• Eliminate Chicken Little – Not every problem is a crisis
• Post Mortems – after the problem is fixed, not before
• Adjustments for Agile or Waterfall
• When does process cripple progress
• The Facebook Effect