Testing Woes; Feedback Slows as Complexity Grows

Reflecting on 20 years in the software industry, the only constant has been the expectation that teams deliver high-quality software systems at ever-increasing speed and scale. This expectation combined with the growing complexity of the problems teams are solving for customers, the solutions they are building and the tooling they are using has left many teams at a breaking point.

Teams often find themselves trapped in a hopeless death spiral. They are forced to cut corners to deliver quickly which inevitably results in poor quality, angry customers and a stressed-out overworked team.

How do teams typically react to these apparent quality problems? They conflate their quality problems with testing problems. They hire testers and instruct them to spend their days writing automated end to end tests in an effort to improve quality.

In essence, the team is trying to manage the complexity associated with their software systems and ways of working by introducing additional complexity in the form of test automation. As a result, teams descend deeper and deeper into this death spiral. Their quality problems persist, the speed of delivery slows and their test automation becomes a huge distraction. So how can teams escape the death spiral of complexity?

In this talk, Rob will explore the sources of this complexity and their effects on the team. He will describe the approach teams can adopt to avoid this death spiral of complexity through a continuous focus on evolving their design and cultivating high-quality feedback loops. Rob will explain the symbiotic relationship that exists between good architectural design and testability. Teams that understand and leverage this relationship utilise automation in a more targeted manner, creating those all-important rapid feedback loops.