This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity and brevity.

 

Emma: Hello listeners, it’s your host Emma Peet. As the end of 2022 approaches, I invite you to reflect on some of the stellar advice given by our guests this year. We’ve put together a compilation of some of the top insights offered by customers, industry innovators, and Tricentis leaders, to get you inspired.

 

If you’re a regular listener of Transformation in 10, you’ll know that I always ask our guests one thing, and that is:

 

In 10 words or less, what’s your best advice for anyone undergoing a digital transformation journey?

 

Aaron Heahn: So, I think it’s close to 10. I think I would probably say something more along the lines of: show your team the horizon, help them believe it’s achievable, and then get the hell out of the way.

 

Ernie Lam: I think it’s having flexibility in the journey that you’re going to be taking because everyone’s journey is different.

 

“There’s no consultant who can come in and deliver you a 20-page pack that will tell you exactly how to get from A to B. You’ve got to do it yourself”.

 

Torsten Welp: For me, it is that digital transformation changes company culture. So, be patient and establish a learning mindset with a positive error culture. That’s my advice.

 

Markus Bonner: I think it’s very important to build a relevant business risk-weighted automated test set for functional and non-functional topics, and of course, include this into your deployment processes, and build this with a dedicated automation expert. And if you don’t have this, get the right partners to do that.

 

Wolfgang Gaida: I would say: start a transformation, make it step-by-step, no big bang, and use Tricentis NeoLoad.

 

Roland Strahlhofer: I want to quote the founder of Tricentis, Wolfgang Platz.

 

“Something Wolfgang has always said which I think is a little bit forgotten, and still so relevant: “Do the right things, and do the things right.” That’s the easiest way to go forward.”

 

Amin Chirazi: Choose the right projects/people and create compelling pilots.

 

Emma: There you heard from incredible champions from our customers, T-Mobile, Sydney Trains, Mobiliar, and Twinformatics, and Managing Directors from Tricentis Partners, Sixsentix and Automators.

 

Depending on our topic of discussion, we’ve sometimes added a twist to this question. This is true for our next lineup of women leaders, who I posed this question to earlier in the year to celebrate Women’s History Month.

 

In 10 words or less, what advice do you have for women who are aspiring for leadership roles in technology today?

 

Viktoria Praschl: The advice I think I would give is: take opportunities. Just like me; I grew up in the small town, then I moved to Vienna, then to New York. Don’t be afraid and just take opportunities. So, it’s actually two words!

 

Armani Black: “The first one is: don’t wait until you possess all of the different qualities that are on a job description to apply for a job. Always aim higher. The second one is: negotiate, negotiate, negotiate.”

 

Louise McCarthy: I think it’s building yourself a really great network, whether that’s a network of females, people in functions, people in C-Suite, or different industry sectors.

 

Emma: Ahead of our Virtual Summit this spring, I spoke to two of our speakers, and I geared the same question towards their specialisms.

 

In 10 words or less, what’s your best advice to anyone looking to succeed when they implement continuous testing?

 

Simona Domazetoska: Put risk, design, codeless, and end-to-end, in the heart of your strategy.

 

In 10 words or less, what’s your best advice for anyone looking to incorporate machine mearning or AIOps into their software delivery?

 

Adam Arakelian: So, one of the things that we struggled with—which I’m sure other people struggle with—is data management. Data management is key. Really understanding where and how your data is managed is super critical.

 

“Where are you getting all your data from? How are you managing it? How are you bringing it together and coalescing it? That’s absolutely critical to driving any kind of ML/AI experience.”

 

Emma: To pivot to another one of our regular questions on the show where we get our magic wands out and ask:

 

If you could change one thing about the application development world, what would that be?

 

Rosalind Radcliffe: I would focus on diversity in the application development world, and on understanding that we need to include all types, all individuals.

 

“We need a more representative set of people in the product teams to make sure we’re delivering the right business value. And that’s from diversity of thought to diversity of everything.”

 

Eric Toburen: For me, it’s all focused around risk. It’s taking the time to understand both the technology and taking the time to understand how their current process is holding them back. Pharmaceutical companies leverage very advanced technology in a lot of different areas. In compliance, it’s like an anchor holding the rest of the organization back. It’s really something that needs to change: to bring these drugs, and medical devices, and products to market much more quickly, and more cost-effectively.

 

Tracy Ragan: As we start baking AI into the process, we’re really talking about replacing what a lot of humans are doing now manually. And this will be essential as we try to push more and more software out the door to our end users, and that software is decoupled; far more complex systems. And we need to have machines starting to do this work, because it’s too complex for a human anymore, and we just don’t have humans to do the work.

 

Jay Williams: I think my biggest beef with the way that we deliver application development at the moment developed over the last few years. I don’t know when it exactly happened, but quality was introduced as a lever to be pulled, and that actually caused a sacrifice in quality in order to hit time, cost, or scope.

 

“Quality definitely needs to be in the final product, especially when we’re seeing how important the customer and user experience is. Considering how much time we spend early on projects in the application lifecycle doing that work—to then let it all down sort of when we get into that testing phase—is something that I’d love to change, but don’t know how.”

 

Cyrus Manouchehrian: The tech stack today in application development is ever-evolving. I think we have to appreciate the adoption of it. There are many companies, many vendors inside and outside of our space, adopting these new technologies. It’s cool to talk about running Kubernetes on EKS or AKS, and many of the different serverless options that are available to us. If there is one thing to change: just don’t forget about quality and the end-user experience.

 

Emma: It’s interesting to note that the last two answers there put quality front and center, and I love that taking calculated risk and focusing on better representation are two wishes expressed by our guests there. I recently asked the same question with a test management spin on it.

 

If you were to change one thing about the way that test management is governed, what would that be?

 

Adam Satterfield: Awareness and education. I’m continually surprised to hear that folks on the project management and product side don’t understand the goal and purpose of testing. I don’t know how many project managers will listen to our call—hopefully lots—because they should be learning about testing. it’s something that is quite frankly missing: an understanding of the role and importance of test management testing across the business side of most companies.

 

Harit Patel: I can’t speak to govern, but I wanted to talk about how testing could be changed a little bit, and how we talk about it.

 

“I feel when we talk about testing, we always talk about “pass” or “fail”. Are we saying it’s a green or a red? Why is there no yellow in between? We should change our talk track of talking about confidence levels. It’s not opaque or transparent; it’s more translucent.”

 

Are we more confident in the testing that we have done? It’s a discussion that we need to have as testers and QA managers with our executives; to talk about that persona change.

 

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