conference talk

The Business Value of Quality

/ Finn Lorbeer / Leave a comment

Traditionally, when talking about the quality of our software, of our product, we discuss how we can ensure a certain level of quality. In this context quality is seen as a minimum requirement. The business value of quality from this perspective is in the prevention of potential losses, e.g. by downtime of a platform.
Today, we can see that this picture shifts dramatically. More and more companies move to a devops culture and we can see the same “shift left” happening in the QA space. Likewise, today’s businesses need to react fast to changes in the market. New technologies emerge faster than companies can pick them up.
We want to talk about a high quality product in this context. The high standard in our products does not just ensure our business and mitigate potential risk. High quality in our software allows us to build better software faster. It makes today’s product more resilient to changes in the future. We change our perspective and do not think how to ensure a certain (minimum) level of quality. But how high quality enables our business.

This talk is a shared effort with my colleague Nina.

Better, Faster, Stronger – Delivering High Quality Products

/ Finn Lorbeer / Leave a comment

Did you know you can enable your team to build better software faster while having a stronger team culture? Too good to be true?
In recent years, agile has influenced early involvement of testing in the development cycle. With this more and more testers are testing new functionality as soon as a commit is pushed. Yet such teams still fail to deliver high quality software. Why? What is missing?
Working with various diverse teams across multiple projects, Finn realised that testing doesn’t actually improve software quality. It’s just a bar assuring a certain level of quality that already exists. In order to actually improve we must get involved into much more than simply testing and think about the product as a whole.
In this session, Finn will share specific examples of how engaging with the business, engineering, process optimisation as well as the entire cross-functional team can lead to significant improvements in the product’s quality. At the end of the talk, you will know how to start with a holistic approach to improving product quality throughout the entire software delivery lifecycle.

— this is a talk I am currently doing on various conferences. Some people asked me if I can share the slides, but the files are just a bit too large. So instead I decided to include a recording of the talk (with the slides) here, as some of them only play well with the presentation.

Pure Performance

/ Finn Lorbeer / Leave a comment

Episode 21: How ThoughtWorks helped Otto.de transform into a real DevOps Culture

Finn Lorbeer (@finnlorbeer) is a quality enthusiast working for Thoughtworks Germany. I met Finn earlier this year at the German Testing Days where he presented the transformation story at Otto.de. He helped transform one of their 14 “line of business” teams by changing the way QA was seen by the organization. Instead of a WALL between Dev and Ops the teams started to work as a real DevOps team. Further architectural and organizational changes ultimately allowed them to increase deployment speed from 2-3 per week to up to 200 per week for the best performing teams.

Episode 22: Latest trends in Software Feature Development: A/B Tests, Canary Releases, Feedback Loops

In Part II with Finn Lorbeer (@finnlorbeer) from Thoughtworks we discuss some of the new approaches when implementing new software features. How can we build the right thing the right way for our end users?
Feature development should start with UX wireframes to get feedback from end users before writing a single line of code. Feature teams then need to define and implement feedback loops to understand how features operate and are used in production. We also discuss the power of A/B testing and canary releases as it allows teams to “experiment” on new ideas and thanks to close feedback loops will quickly learn on how end users are accepting it.