BetVictor
About BetVictor:
BetVictor, originally Victor Chandler, formed in 1946, is one of the world’s leading independent Sports betting and online gambling organisations. For more than seven decades it has provided customers better value for money.
Services include a wide range of online betting opportunities on all major sports as well as trackside & over the phone bets. Our values of honesty, integrity, pioneering spirit and commitment to adapt new technologies drive us to provide the best quality online betting experience to our customers.
About My Role:
This has is been my biggest challenge to date - it involves more of a focus on coaching development teams how to be more effective & efficient at testing in order to meet the stricter timelines demanded in an Agile environment.
My primary focus is on where testing & Testers “fit” in an Agile development lifecycle. My main driver is to get testing & quality baked into the software development as early as possible.
I have to find a balance between testing the software & coaching the Testers & Programmers on the team. This coaching is currently taking place in the trenches and lunch-n-learn / brownbag sessions.
The cultural aspect is proving to be the trickiest hurdle to overcome. This is a good thing for me as it really makes me stop & think about the suggestions I put forward & how I react when those suggestions are not received as I’d hoped.
Being a Tester & coach in the teams has had its challenges, for example, lacking a certain independence means some conversations are more difficult. To counter this though, being embedded in the team has whole host of advantages, including a clearer understanding of some of the problems the team are encountering.
About my achievements
I have been embedded into 2 teams in my time at BetVictor:
- Web / frontend team (Ruby on Rails)
- Payments team (Java)
I have helped the teams:
- Understand what “testing” means for different members of the development team;
- Test continuously;
- Work around blockers to testing (e.g. missing test environments) in order to still meet tight deadlines;
- Get their Testers & Programmers working closer together;
- Work closer with Business stakeholders to understand business goals & priorities
- Get focused on software as a means to solve a problem;
- Understand the problem before writing any code;
- Understand that code in development is waste - code only makes money when it is Production.
Please feel free to get in touch to discuss further.
