Transforming Large Organisations | Why Didn't You Test That?

00:00 - Introduction to Chris Rowett and his role in Customer Success.

03:29 - An imperative for change that comes from the market.

04:27 - Understanding who cares related to the business goal.

05:35 - Identifying the imperative towards change between C-Level.

07:00 - Be more substantial across quality by creating a proof point.

09:22 - Solutionism versus test strategy and hard dollar payback.

13:00 - Implications on reputational damage of a low quality product.

19:00 - Refactoring at the organisational level.

21:55 - The impact of misaligned metrics.

35:01 - Understanding stages of coding towards production.

38:05 - A strategy for tools and automation to gain efficiency.

Welcome to episode 9 of the Why Didn’t You Test That? Podcast, hosted by Huw Price and Rich Jordan! In this episode, our hosts are joined by Chris Rowett, DevOps & Digital Transformation Leader, together they explore the challenges associated with bringing change to large organisations!

Organisational change is painful and disruptive, it can change roles and cause concern amongst teams, so in terms of value and results, a good and compelling reason is needed to entice change. In conversation with DevOps and Digital Transformation leader Chris Rowett, Curiosity Software’s Huw Price and Rich Jordan look at factors around success metrics, and how they impact quality processes in an organisation’s software release cycle. In terms of building momentum for transformation, how do you get 60% of the organisation aligned for that push towards crossing the chasm?

Test transformations that are delivered top down, translate to increased automation and cost-cutting, but how you get there? That is the challenge. Transformation should come through understanding coverage, stability, repeatability, this will help your organisation make better business decisions and encourage change.

The challenge then is to update metrics to enable organisational agility. Huw Price calls this ‘quantifiable testability’, so measuring how easy something is to test, and not code quality itself. For Rich Jordan, the concern for updating metrics is that, if over a 15-20 year span within the industry only around 15-20% of tests are automated, we’re missing something. Data on failure should in fact educate the business in understanding how to handle complexity.

Is your organisational design sufficiently enabling business owners and IT to communicate? For instance, we need better attention on aligning the business service with the mechanisms in IT to enable netter communication. This translates to organisational refactoring, which in turn pays off technical debt. Otherwise, against your competitors, either through release of a poor product, or risk of regulatory fines, through slow compliance, you risk reputational and monetary damage.

The Curiosity Software Podcast featuring Huw Price and Rich Jordan! Together, they share their insight and expertise in driving software design and development in test. Learn how you can improve your journey to quality software delivery, by considering how much do you really understand about your systems, and when things inevitably go wrong, why didn’t you test that?