How to Design a World Class Quality Assurance Team 
Iris C. Trout
Director of Quality
Bloomberg, lp

Introduction:

I have created and managed several large quality assurance organizations. Each and every time I am asked to create a QA organization , I am met with management expectations that are unrealistic. I think that people who are not familiar with what it takes to create a strong QA organization tend to minimize the effort and the quality of the people needed to perform the job. My presentation teaches those beginners how to create a solid team rather than a shaky one. I present the essentials, such as interviewing questions, training materials and organizational structure possibilities that will help the neophyte start a strong test department.

Learning Objectives:

The participant will learn how to focus on certain key areas to successfully create and manage a Quality Assurance organization.

Outline:

  • Essential components of a QA organization
  • Staffing Model
  • Hiring a Solid Tester
  • Stakeholder commitment
  • Stakeholder communication
  • Bugs, Defects, Trouble Reports
  • Defect categorization
  • Goal and Mission Statements
  • Service level agreements
  • Process Improvements
  • Metrics and Reporting
  • What is your Strategy?
  • How will you implement changes?
  • Where is your QA organization today?
  • End state of test automation
  • Steps to automate
  • Tools evaluation
  • Automation take-aways
  • What does automation need to be successful
  • Wrap up
  • QA interview questionnaire
  • Stakeholder analysis template
  • Quality Masters training presentation
  • Metrics scorecard sample
  • Peer review score card template
  • Goal template

Biography:

Iris C. Trout is the director of Global Quality at Bloomberg,lp. In her role she has created a strong 75 person global team whose success is achieved through risk based testing, script peer review, and test automatio . She is heavily involved with process improvement and metrics and reporting and has created an environment of continuous process improve through the use of process action teams.

Iris has created and managed Quality Assurance teams for the past twenty years and has led efforts in large brokerage and banking organizations such as Merrill Lynch and McKinsey & Company prior to her career at Bloomberg.

Iris has been a CMM lead assessor and holds a black belt in Six Sigma.