Mary Thorn has had the opportunity in the past twenty years to work at many startups, creating several QA/test departments from scratch. For the past ten years, she has done this in agile software companies. Recently Mary moved from leading small agile test organizations to leading a large agile test organization where she has learned how to lead agile testers and agile testing in large contexts. Mary takes you through what she has learned, identifies the keys to transitioning your test organization as it grows, and discusses the techniques required to lead it through the changes. Agile testing is difficult; training your testers to be consistent and interchangeable across large scale agile teams is even more difficult; and still more difficult is test automation at scale. Join Mary as she shares her experience in creating an automation strategy that works in a large scale context and lessons learned from leading a large agile test organization.
Chief storyteller of the book The Three Pillars of Agile Testing and Quality, Mary Thorn is owner of Mary Thorn Consulting in Raleigh, NC. During her more than twenty years of experience with healthcare, financial, and HR SaaS-based products, Mary has held director, manager- and contributor-level positions in software development organizations. A seasoned leader and coach in agile and testing methodologies, Mary has direct experience building and leading teams through large scale agile transformations. Mary’s special expertise is a combination of testing, DevOps, and agile scaling skills that her clients find incredibly valuable. She is also a frequent speaker, teacher and author. You can connect with Mary via LinkedIn.