CAST 2015

The Lean Startup movement focuses relentlessly on pushing value to customers quickly and reducing waste, in part through encouraging a culture of exploration and experimentation. As testers, we can apply our critical thinking and analysis skills, and our willingness to be creative and notice what no one else does to greatly improve product/market fit and generate revenue-producing information for our firms.  In this talk, we will examine some of the main ideas of the Lean Startup movement (build-measure-learn, A/B testing, minimum viable product, and continuous innovation) in the light of the principles of context-driven testing. The current interest in Lean techniques in the enterprise indicates a massive demand for testing skills that may not be identified as such.  We will map our experiences as testers to the Lean Startup ideas (and buzzwords) to assist in making the case for a crucial role for testers in the product marketing function.