Kari Kakkonen

Expertise Development Capability Owner at Gofore

BIO

Mr. Kari Kakkonen has worked in software testing for almost 30 years. He is the co-author of ‘ACT 2 LEAD Software Testing Leadership Handbook’. Kari is the 2021 EuroSTAR Testing Excellence Award winner, Tester of the Year in Finland Award 2021 winner, and DASA Exemplary DevOps Instructor Award 2023 winner. He is the author and CEO of Dragons Out Oy, which created a fantasy book to teach software testing to children. Kari works at Gofore as Expertise Capability Owner running a training business and provides software testing, agile, DevOps, and AI training services in Europe He has M.Sc. from Aalto University (aalto.fi). He works mostly with agile testing, lean, test automation, DevOps, and AI. Kari has been working in ICT consulting, training, finance, insurance, pension insurance, public sector, embedded software, telecom, gaming, and industry domains. Kari was on the Executive Committee of ISTQB (istqb.org) 2015-2021. He is on the Board of Directors of TMMi (tmmi.org). He is the Treasurer of FiSTB (fistb.fi). He is the co-founder of FiSTB Testing Assembly, the biggest testing seminar in Finland, for which he has been a co-organiser for 10 years. Kari is a singer, snowboarder, kayaker, husband and dad. Kari has given public talks and is a passionate advocate for software testing and QA. He is active on LinkedIn and welcomes you to network.

Talk (Advanced):

Taking action to lead software testing

In the evolving software development landscape, effective testing leadership has become the key to delivering high-quality products. However, many organizations struggle with challenges: misunderstood testers, testing not valued, insufficient testing resources, and ineffective testing practices. In simple terms: testing is not lead. This talk revolutionizes your approach to software testing leadership, empowering you to drive meaningful change within your organization.

Drawing from our extensive experience spanning six decades of leadership, mentoring, and testing, and distilled wisdom from our book "ACT 2 LEAD – Software Testing Leadership Handbook". We will unveil the critical actions that leaders at all levels, including you, must take to elevate software testing from a siloed activity to a company-wide strategic initiative.

● Add testing to everything you do so that testing is not a separate function, phase, or process. Lead it as a holistic effort.

● Context: Understand your context and lead testing accordingly. There is not just one correct way to test or lead.

● Transparency: Demand and create visibility into testing, regardless of whether testing is outsourced or not. The better the visibility, the better it can be led.

● 2: Ensure that both humans and test automation test your software. Humans are good at exploring the software, and test automation is good at checking the software - both are needed.

● Learn: Learn to test and test to learn. Use learning to improve testing and test leadership. Learn also to improve the software being tested and the business.

● Enable: Enable good quality testing by creating a quality culture where the importance of testing and quality is understood. Boost the culture via your daily work and the decisions you make.

● Adapt: Adapt testing to risks. Focus testing on high-risk areas and mitigate risks by testing those areas first.

● Diverse: Ensure that testing is diverse. The more diverse testing you have, the more diverse information you will get. We will unveil the critical actions that leaders at all levels, including you, must take to elevate software testing from a siloed activity to a company-wide strategic initiative. You can transform your software testing leadership approach. By applying the principles shared in this talk, you can drive improvements in your organization's testing practices and software quality, reflecting positively on your organization’s business. You’ll be ready to implement, or help leadership to implement, these principles at all leadership levels of your organization.

Key Takeaways

● Leadership must take the necessary actions to lead software testing and cannot delegate it.

● Leadership can use our eight-step principles to focus on test leadership at organizational, operational, and individual levels.

● All levels of leadership should be supported to lead testing efficiently.

Workshop:

How to lead testing at the organizational level?

Test leadership is required at organizational and operational levels in many organizations. In this tutorial, we explain the fundamentals of test leadership and have practical exercises to understand it. We discuss what leadership means in different scenarios, where effective test leadership is needed, and where leadership is all too often missing. Testing leadership is always needed, even if testing or development is subcontracted. Especially in any larger organization, organizational leadership is needed for testing, for example, to set the vision, harmonize testing across different teams, increase productivity, align testing activities, and support different management levels and teams doing the testing. The tutorial utilizes the ACT2LEAD heuristic about software testing leadership. To understand it properly, the audience is divided into teams with brief exercises for each part of the heuristic. The ACT2LEAD heuristics consists of eight core practices of testing leadership. We’ll go through eight principles in practice. We'll explore how to add testing into all software development actions (ACT), how to choose the right testing based on context (CONTEXT), how to create visibility for the quality of testing practices and test results (TRANSPARENCY), and how to strike the perfect balance between automated testing and human-driven exploration (2). Then we talk about learning as a way to improve (LEARN), enabling a culture of quality and continuous improvement (ENABLE), aligning testing efforts with product risks (ADAPT), and implementing diverse testing approaches for finding diverse sets of defects and observations (DIVERSE).

The tutorial includes three exercises set in the context of a large, imaginary corporation case study. In teams, participants create software testing leadership artifacts for the case study organization. Each participant is encouraged to bring a laptop, although it is enough to have one laptop per four people. Internet access is needed, too.

Each participant gets an ACT 2 LEAD Software Testing Leadership Handbook as an e-book.

Outline

What is testing leadership

Heuristics for testing leadership, including brief exercises
Organizational and operational levels of testing leadership Lunch break
Exercises: Create an organizational-level testing policy
Exercise: Plan contractual requirements for testing when testing is outsourced
Exercise: Create an organizational-level strategy or guidelines