Last week I went to the best thee day conference I have ever been to, and got paid for it too! I flew from my home in Nashville to Denver, CO to assist Matt Heusser in teaching a three day class focused on lean principles in software quality and delivery.

Lean Software Testing is a one, two, or three day class created by Matt Heusser. The class combines years of research and experience on applying Lean concepts in software development with software expertise in practical problems of software quality and delivery. The result is a class that can help your test and quality team do their work smaller (we are talking about Lean, right), better, and faster. This is not an introductory class about software testing, but testers of all experience levels can certainly find value in the material and teaching. We have experience teaching this class to experience levels ranging from the newest interns all the way to the most engaged experts in the test community with 20+ years of experience.

A few weeks before class starts, Matt and I will have a discovery call with your team where we will mention a few of the concepts covered in the class and see what your teams experience level with the material is. Also, we will ask a few probing questions to discover what we like to call critical success factors: these are the things you must absolutely take away from the course to consider it a success. We want to provide a class that is timely and relevant to your team, this can help get us there.

Day one started immediately with a group exercise focused on team dynamics. This is a great way for people that may not know each other to get acquainted and also jumps right into valuable course work from minute one. After this we do a formal introduction, meet the attendees, and  explore what they want to get out of the class. The rest of the day is spent on studying and doing exercises on team dynamics, test planning, and comparing scripted and exploratory test approaches.

Day two is spent alternating between theory from Lean and exercises crafted to show exactly how the theory works. Where Agile training will tell you what you should do, we will explain exactly why approaching work in specific ways will help you deliver better software faster. This is practical information you can take back to work on Monday and use to provide real value. Value that your customers will be happy to pay for. Attendees will have a set os tools, but more importantly, they will know why those tools work so they can apply them across a variety os situations in your organization. We end the day with a one hour facilitated problem session where attendees discuss problems relevant to their environment and the group helps discover solutions.

Day three is emergent, we take lessons from the last group session on day two and mash them together with the theme of our course. We pull from our bag of LST content and present material that that is immediately relevant to your context. Some of the popular topics for day three are: tactics to help your group do regression testing faster and in a way that helps the business, a survey of test design techniques, test automation for non-technical people with live examples, and performing skilled bug reporting. There is much more, we are happy to customize content to the needs of your group.

Once the class is done, your testers are not left high and dry wondering how to apply everything they just learned. We provide lifetime support for all graduates of LST. Once class is complete, students are given access to the Lean Software Testing google group where they can talk about questions and real work problems and get support from LST instructors and graduates alike.

I can’t wait for the next teaching opportunity. If you are interested in getting Lean Software at your organization, please get in touch with Matt Heusser or myself.