1. We will look at the improvements that we had to make, which will benefit any testers, not just those in this situation.
2. We will see that sometimes it takes a crisis in order to invigorate positive change.

Kevin Harris has been in Software Testing for nearly 20 years, working in a variety of industries – loyalty, travel, health, Government, marketing and communications, and in a variety of roles from Tester to Test Manager (via Developer, Business Analyst and Scrum Master). Kevin is specifically interested in the Agile Process and the positive effect it has had on the Development process in the last ten years. Kevin lives in a small village in the South of England, where he moans about the weather, grows dandelions and fails to put up shelves.

How would you cope if you lost one third of your testers overnight?
Well, this happened to us – we went, with no warning, from 12 to 8 testers in a day, supporting the same number of Developers.
This is the story of what we had to do in order to continue to provide a first-class test function with one third less testers.
We will look at all we did to improve our performance, reduce extraneous work, automate everything, and make testing the lean function it had to be in order to cope and thrive.