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Virtually Speaking: Leading Distributed Test Teams

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As a newly promoted quality assurance manager, Willie Smith assumed responsibility for a large application that allows UPS customers to ship packages worldwide. His team was distributed worldwide and had varying levels of automation experience, application knowledge, and QA processes in place. With the next deployment date only a few months away, Willie found that the testing side of the project was in trouble. To align the test team with project and company goals, he had to develop virtual training plans and implement new practices to deal with the host of issues he faced. One key step was to quickly select and implement new communication and collaboration tools for his distributed team and others to use. Willie shares how all the stakeholders pulled together, employing updated practices and new tools to pull off what some thought was a “mission impossible.” Come and listen to Willie’s story to learn how you can develop, train, lead, and manage virtual teams—large or small.


Willie Smith, CTAL-TM, PMP, has more than twenty years of IT experience in software development, web testing, risk-based testing, automated testing, and project management. A quality assurance (QA) manager at UPS in the information systems division, Willie is a highly efficient, methodical, and talented leader in developing and implementing effective QA processes. He currently leads a team of several programmers and manual and automation QA specialists, testing a company-critical web service application that is used more than 50 million times a day on Before joining UPS, Willie worked as an eBusiness consultant for IBM, helping Fortune 500 companies develop and implement their eBusiness strategies.