212: Value Stream Integration with Matt Angerer & Jeff Downs • Test Guild

With more and more companies moving away from centralization or standardization of their tools to conduct delivery of software it even harder to establish traceability for one artifact to the next across the entire organization That’s where the power of value stream integration comes in. In this episode, we’ll be Test Talking all about Value Stream Integration with Jeff Downs and Matt Angerer from Tasktop Technologies. Get ready to discover how you can dramatically improve the efficiency of your software development and delivery process.

About Jeff & Matt

Jeff Downs has more than ten years of hands-on testing and test tool experience at LexisNexis where he led the transformation for their Test Center of Excellence. As a tool administrator, Jeff drove the effort to improve efficiency and capability through tool best practices, integration, and administration. After seeing first-hand how disparate tool suites can hinder an organization, Jeff joined Tasktop to help fulfill the company’s mission of connecting the world of software delivery. At Tasktop, he helps companies in a wide variety of industries bridge the gap between tools, make better use of software development and delivery tools, and enable collaboration across the software lifecycle—through the power of integration.

Matt Angerer is a Sr. Pre-Sales Engineer for Tasktop Technologies (www.tasktop.com). Since 2002, Matt has worked as an ERP Consultant, QA Leader, Solution Architect, Startup Founder, and Blogger/Author. His passion for high quality working software, the elimination of waste (Lean Thinking), and Value Stream Integration (VSI) are central themes for his Editorial contributions, Webinars, and TestTalks.

Quotes & Insights from this Test Talk

Value stream integration to me is really looking at your business from requirements in-take all the way down through the operational aspects of your organization. And in our little world, I call our little world. It’s a huge world of software-defined enterprises but that includes everything from that point and everything in between. The creation of artifacts. And when I mentioned artifacts I’m speaking to you know functional designs and technical designs and epics and user stories and features and all the different terminology that we hear in the industry. In addition to all the various terminology that we hear as it relates to testing, you know test plans, test cases, test configurations parameters and the list goes on.
Value Steam Integration is how do we as an organization Interlink all of these sort of interdependent aspects of the business together. Organizations today. We’re seeing a trend in the market. They’re moving away from centralization or standardization of their tools to conduct delivery of software to sort of bring your own tools. If you have a better way of doing we are seeing it there are very large enterprises you know your global conglomerates that have multiple lines of businesses each using different ALM tools.
It starts out by really stepping back and stepping outside of the context of the tools that you use to manage your epics and stories and tests and defects and so forth in really breaking down, how work is defined in your organization. How that works then gets approved, gets broken down into smaller and more granular pieces of work, how it gets validated and tested, developed, and ultimately delivered out to your customers.
So once you have the tools connected now you’re able to automatically establish traceability for one artifact to the next across the entire value stream.
The only metrics that I’ve been thinking about lately as it relates to Value Stream Integration is around defect detection percentage. So defect detection percentage (DDP) is really just a very simple calculation of defects found by this testing quote unquote. And I’ll define that in a second, divided by the total defects including those found afterward. The point is DDP helps us identify how effective our regression testing is over a particular build and whether the quality of the test cases whether the automated testing or the manual testing is truly effective and trapping defects and preventing them from slipping through to our production environment.
TaskTop drives competitive advantage by dramatically improving the efficiency of the software development and delivery process. They do this by providing fully automated, enterprise-grade integration of the tools used by all the various stakeholders in this process.

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