It was an interesting day out Thursday at the Iqnite London QA and Software Testing Conference 2011.  An opportunity to bump into some known names in the QA space like Shane Kelly (QMF fame), who’s at our client William Hill, as well as to meet and network with new folk, and share the platform with old friends like Den from Dixons Stores.

The panel ran an interesting group session after lunch, involving a bit more energy as people moved round the room to reflect where they saw themselves on the continuum from being pure QA folk, or pure software Testing, or a bit of both. More of that later.

The Keynote from Jason Tylor at Spec Savers was fascinating.  It seems that off-shoring there, and often elsewhere,  results in a pulling back from an agile approach. Jason was talking on Managed Testing, using 3rd parties, and showed some major benefits from the approach, cost savings not being the least of them.

The session I did with Den Fitzpatrick from Dixons Stores in the morning had also hinged on this issue of trying to get the whole business to engage. The header was ‘Uniting the Tribes: Bringing IT and Business together through Testing’ .  It showed how Dixons website is managed via a complex mix of different teams at different countries, and how the use of Dynamic User Journeys as a common language, provides a unifying force that cuts back the usual inter-team friction andgreatly reduces the difficulty of getting hard facts about what is happening on the website.

Source: http://www.scivisum.co.uk/blog/qa-is-not-software-testing-quality-is-your-users-experience?option=com_wordpress&Itemid=192