Many large organizations have evolved their test processes project by project and department by department, leading to inefficient practices, overlapping activities, redundant test environments, shelfware test tools, and more. It is possible, however, to focus on a few key areas and bring even the most wildly different test approaches together. Bill Schongar describes the real-world testing problems at Cisco: thousands of test engineers, a never-ending variety of practices, and numerous tools-all deployed across a large spectrum of environments. Employing collaborative communication among test groups, standardized test coding practices, common test environments, best of breed test tooling, and consolidated results tracking, Cisco was able to integrate their diverse testing approaches successfully. Discover what worked (and what failed) and how Cisco made testing faster, more effective, and less painful-even fun at times.

Even if you have the best tools and processes in the world, if your staff is not motivated and productive, your testing efforts will be weak and ineffective. Retired Marine Colonel Rick Craig describes how using the Marine Corps Principles of Leadership can help you become a better leader and, as a result, a better test manager. Learn the difference between leadership and management and how they complement each other. Join in the discussion and share ideas that have helped energize your testers (and those that didn't). Rick discusses motivation, morale, training, span of control, immersion time, and how to promote the testing discipline within your organization. He also addresses the importance of influence leaders and how they can be used as agents of change.

Testing, once a marginalized function at Google, is now an integral part of Google's innovation machine. Patrick Copeland describes how this vital transformation took place. As he was analyzing how to be more efficient and better align his testing team with the needs of the company, Patrick realized they had to move beyond "just testing" and become a force for change. His approach was based on five powerful principles: (1) Building feature factories rather than products, (2) Embedding testing at the grass roots level, (3) Solving problems of scale with technology, (4) Automating at the right level of abstraction, (5) Only doing what the team can do well. Learn how Google test teams used these principles to shift from a "service group" composed predominantly of exploratory testers to an "engineering group" with technical skills.

"What haven't you noticed lately?" Marshall McLuhan is said to have asked this paradoxical question-a vital one for testers, because it prompts more questions about things that testers could and should notice. Great testing is about noticing things and asking questions about them. Have you ever found a problem in a program without using a named testing technique or found that some testers seem to be magnets for bugs, seeing things that you don't? As a test manager, do you wish that your team could look beyond the obvious and discover more defects? Have you noticed that artists, comedians, designers, and novelists notice things that the rest of us don't notice? Michael Bolton believes that many important problems in our products are not found by using formulaic testing techniques. Instead, they are discovered through a rich set of cognitive skills that can be taught and learned.