Velocity: the Number’s not Important… the Learning Is
Back in 1996 I took up golf. I was terrible at it. Like most people who take up a new hobby, I spent a good bit of time (and money) trying to improve.
QA Process in Agile: Avoiding Silos, Pro Whole-Team Approach
Who is Responsible for Software Quality in Agile? The QA process in agile differs greatly from QA in traditional testing, such as in Waterfall.Agilehas changed the way we think of software quality. In fact,I have read rumblings in the blogosphere that Agile has killed QA.I promise youQuality Assuranceis alive and well on agile teams.It just looks different than what most of us are used to. I think people who have promoted the “death” of QA in agile are not looking closely enough at...
Scrum Sprint for Quality: The Hare and the Agile Tortoise
The Hare and the Tortoise (or The Tortoise and the Hare, since that is what people told me it was called when I was young) is a fable attributed to Aesop, an ancient Greek storyteller. For those of you who are not familiar with it, a hare challenges a tortoise to a race. The hare, in his overconfidence, decides to take a nap when he gets close to the finish line. The tortoise plods along, eventually passing the hare, and wins the race. The moral of the story is:slow and steady wins the race.
Quality in Testing: Everyone's Responsibility
Once upon a time, in the land of Waterfall, the business analysts wrote the requirements, the developers coded the requirements and the Testers tested the requirements. Each of these people sat in his/her ivory tower, um, silo and did that which they had always done since the beginning of time.Quality was thought to be synonymous with testing, and therefore was considered to exist solely in the Tester’s realm. Present Day Quality Fast forward to today, on an agile team and the...
Moving from doing agile to BEING agile
Are you an experienced tester who has recently joined an agile team? Maybe you have testing experience but until now it has only been on traditional waterfall projects. Are you going through the motions with this new way of doing things but don’t feel like you’re completely invested? Do you even feel like you’re adding value to your team? Often times, when a company begins their agile transformation they think they are BEING agile when in fact they are justdoing it. Being agile takes...
Three Key Agile-Centric Metrics
In one of our previous blogs the term “just enough” was used to portray the idea that we (whether you’re in a testing, dev, or management roll) should help everyone on the team to resist gold plating and actively help and encourage each other to do just enough. And that by doing the “right just enough” we are BEING agile. But why? You may ask, is this term so important? Because it plays into the team’s overall velocity. My friend and colleague, Shaun Bradshaw, and I were recently...
Pair-Coaching
Pair-Coaching in Agile Coaching Some Resistance to Pair-Coaching It’s Not Just the Teams Changing your Lens Adaptive Pair-Coaching Strategy One Voice Wrapping Up I’ve been doing more pairing lately. Much more. But, more specifically pair-coaching. I’ve been pairing in my conference workshops and talks, quite a bit, with Mary Thorn on theagilequality and testing side of things. I’m also pairing with Josh Anderson on our Meta-cast and I’ve done a few presentations with him. Very...
Refactoring and Technical Debt: It's Not a Choice, It's a Responsibility
A few years back I was coaching a large group of Scrum teams at an email marketing SaaS firm. The group had been practicing Scrum for over four years and had become a high-performance agile organization. Most of my efforts focused on fine-tuning from the perspective of an external set of eyes. Working with this organization and its development teams was a privilege. Refactoring vs. Technical Debt Broad vs. Narrow Consideration Stop Digging the Hole and Deeper Fill in the Hole Broadly...
Hardening Sprints: The Good, Bad, and Downright Ugly
Moving On… Hardening Sprint Stabilization Sprint Release Readiness Sprint Spring Cleaning Sprint Why the Dreaded ‘Hardening Sprint’? Get Out of Jail Free Card Conceptual Support Hardening Contexts Distributed and At-Scale Agile Customer Receptivity Test Automation Coverage Skewed Sprint Consolidation Defect Rework Deployment Readiness and Training Regulation, Governance, and the Art of Trivialized Agile Testing Wrapping Up For Further Reading I remember the threatening email as if I...