One year of building a product, from quarterly to monthly releases. From 27 days to 19 minutes release lead time. 13 reusable test charters, 1851 programmatic tests executed in pipelines frequent enough to produce 50 000 test results a day. No bug reports written and zero bugs policy for releasing. This describes my current team in a nutshell.

Modern test management relies on frequent, moving up to continuous releases. Working from a known good baseline taking small steps following the change allows for a new way of managing testing. And while numbers of programmatic tests are impressive, the bugs they miss that exploratory testing - also using automation - finds are more impressive. We say that the large numbers of programmatic tests do 10% of the testing the team does. 90% of the work is keeping test systems up to par with the latest scope of system we deliver and attending to results gap programmatic tests inherently include.

In this talk, we learn to manage testing maintaining agency - the capacity of individuals to act independently and make their own free choices. This is not a story about managing testing based on sessions. This is a story of working with product owners to identify gaps and assign responsibilities, working with teams to make the right skills available for different kinds of testing tasks across roles, identifying testing roadblocks with data deep dives and creating space where test design and test execution always come together while navigating corporate documentation requirements. Practices to this are frequent deliveries, following change, whole-team test automation, bug reports as conversations, pair and ensemble testing, and feature checklists. We need to ensure we pay attention to both testing of today and testing of the future.