Testing Legacy Apps

I'm making my slides from my talk today available here for all to see and slam. The slides themselves are fairly content-sparse, because I really do hate having a bunch of text on slides when I'm talking. People try to read while I'm talking, or I read text that's clearly on the slides, neither of which seems productive. So the slides are clipart-heavy. In addition, however, I am also going to post my mind map from when I was creating this presentation.

The basis of the presentation centers around my most recent few years of experience: how to handle targeting a test strategy on a legacy system. I've seen a surprisingly large number of companies that either "go agile" after having only manual testing for a while, or companies that have been around for a while and just never had a test team at all.

In these cases, trying to create a test team or convert a team of manual testers to more "agile" testers, often times while the whole organization is transitioning, is an incredibly daunting task. Personally, I've gotten overwhelmed at times with all of the things that need to be done -- how do you automate when there's still all of those manual tests to be done? My presentation relies heavily on the expert advice (via books and blogs) from Mike Cohn and Michael Feathers. In any case, here are the slides and the mind map (in pdf format).

Please provide feedback .... I think this is a talk I may try to give more often, and would love to ensure that I have the most broad base of input I can get. Thanks in advance :)

Testing Legacy Apps Powerpoint

Testing Legacy Apps mindmap (pdf)