Karen Rosengren’s Star West 2010 session was about how to build a test strategy. The big thing for me is that I need to learn about Value Stream Mapping.

• Identify the problem — capture metrics that shoe you have a problem and the value of solving it. A big thing here is that you are making sure to understand not only that automation can solve a problem but that it should actually be solved.
• Symptoms are not useful in identification
• Too often the automation team’s job is to solve your company’s equivalent of world hunger
• Start from where you are. So where are you?
• Value Stream Mapping – sit the team down and find out what you are doing now
• True value is adding when I’m running the tests. The setup etc. is necessary time but not value add.
• Big wins to be had automating to build deployment and environment configuration. She uses Tivoli (since she works for IBM), but nicely avoiding turning it into a Tivoli sales presentation — which it could have quite easily.
• The Star audience is largely non-technical so she pointed out you are going to need programmers.
• Split metrics into two buckets
  • Business Impact – illustrate the business value and help sell projects
  • Operating – how well the implementation is going
• Automation is not just test execution
• Rank scripts by time and effort when deciding what to automation