Your Manager Asks for a Massive Test Plan During a Two-week Sprint Your Manager Asks for Resource Estimates for the Next 6 Months Your Manager Asks for a Detailed, Metrics-driven Daily Status Report Your Manger Thinks This is Doing Agile Wrapping Up
A seasoned director of software development was championing agile adoption at her company; it was a moderately scaled initiative, including around 100 developers, testers, project managers, BAs and the functional management surrounding them. They received some initial agile training, seemed to be energized and aligned with the methods, and were set loose to start sprinting. Six months later things were in shambles. Managers were micromanaging the sprints and adjusting team estimates...
Coaching to Avoid Failure Agile Exposure The Notion of ‘Failing Forward’ Wrapping Up – But, I’m a Bit Strange… I was at a conference not long ago speaking on and sharing variousagiletopics. After one of my presentations, a young man stopped me to ask a few questions. We struck up a nice conversation that eventually discussing sprint dynamics within Scrum teams. I mentioned that I usually coach teams toward declaring their sprints a success…or (pause for meaningful effect) …a failure.
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...
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...
For some,integrating testers into agileteams stands to be the real challenge, especially when working with distributed agile teams. I’ve sharedagilemethods for over ten years at conferences and workshops. One of the top three questions I always receive from attendees is: Does Agile work with distributed teams? A Tale of Two Distributed Teams The “Bad to Ugly” Establish the Team(s) Train the Team Together Establish Norms, Standards, and a Character Sprint Review Together! Wrapping Up
In myprevious postI shared about experience I’ve had in “connecting” UX activity into Scrum development teams. I tried to explain a pattern of collaborative partnering over either embedded UX in the teams or independent UX outside of the teams. I thought I’d share another story that illustrates an aspect of these ideas.
Matt Kortering of Universal Mind, wrote a blog post aboutHow UX Fits Within a SAFe Environment. Lately I’ve been thinking about and writing about the scaling models, so a part of this fits well with current themes. But I don’t want you to get stuck on the SAFe bits here. I truly want this to be a generic blog post about handling UX concerns and x-team integration within anyagilemethod or approach. Here’s what Matt had to say towards the end of his post:
David Dang and Shaun Bradshaw from Zenergy Technologies will speak at SQE's STAREAST in Orlando, Florida in May 2013. Shaun Bradshaw presents May 1, 2013 on Yin and Yang: Metrics within Agile and Traditional Lifecycles as well as Taming the Beast: Test/QA on Large-scale Projects. David Dang will present Mobile Testing Tools 101 on May 2, 2013.
