At the Agile Testing Days Rob Lambert presented on how Structures kill testing creativity.
Continue reading Agile Testing Days: Structures Kill Testing CreativityAgile Testing Days: Deception and Estimation: How We Fool Ourselves
The second keynote at the Agile Testing Days was presented from Linda Rising on Hardwired for deception means trouble with estimates. This is the write-up of her session.
Continue reading Agile Testing Days: Deception and Estimation: How We Fool OurselvesAgile Testing Days: One small change to code, one giant leap towards testability
Brett Schuchert gave a presentation on bringing in testability to your code at the Agile Testing Days. This is my write-up of the presentation.
Continue reading Agile Testing Days: One small change to code, one giant leap towards testabilityAgile Testing Days: Agile Defect Management
Lisa Crispin gave the first keynote in the morning of the Agile Testing Days in Berlin. She talked about an approach to defect management and tracking.
Continue reading Agile Testing Days: Agile Defect ManagementWhat you always wanted to know about Testing and Quality Assurance – Standards & Methods
Continuing the series of questions from the CONQUEST 2010 conference two weeks back, we’ll take a closer look on questions regarding standards and methods.
What you always wanted to know about Testing and Quality Assurance – Outsourcing
Today in the “What you always wanted to know about Testing and Quality Assurance” I will answer questions from the outsourcing category. Since this is a hot topic for me, I hope not to rant too much at it, but let’s see.
Continue reading What you always wanted to know about Testing and Quality Assurance – OutsourcingWhat you always wanted to know about Testing and Quality Assurance – Agile Test Management
Continuing the What you always wanted to know about Testing and Quality Assurance series, we will take a closer on Agile Test Management today. Please note that I consider the term Agile Test Management to be an oxymoron. The team is self-managing in Agile, and there is no dedicated manager role to grant the team enough power to manage itself. This surely needs lots of trust – especially when transitioning from a more traditional environment. but is essential to any team effort.
Continue reading What you always wanted to know about Testing and Quality Assurance – Agile Test ManagementWhat you always wanted to know about Testing and Quality Assurance – Testing as a profession
Last week I attended the CONQUEST 2010 conference. As I was invited to be part of an experts panel, I answered some questions from the conference attendees about testing, quality, and how all of this works. In particular I was invited as an expert on Agile testing. The session was voice recorded, in order for the transcript to be provided online in a few weeks. Since it will be on German and we had to restrict our answers to two minutes, I asked the organizers, Karin Vosseberg and Andreas Spillner, whether I may translate the questions to English and publish them on my blog, and got the permission to do so. So, this is the first set of questions (from the CONQUEST 2010 attendees) and answers (from myself). The first set of questions is filed under the topic “Testing as a profession”.
Traffic Lights and Quality Gates
While visiting the CONQUEST 2010 in Dresden, Germany, I noticed something while wandering the large pavements in this city. Each time I had to cross the streets at traffic lights, I noticed that I had to stop, press the button for the lights to turn green – after some time. This morning on my way from the hotel to the conference place, it struck me, that this steadily slowed down my own progress. Each time I had to stop at the traffic lights, I was considering what needed to be improved in order for me to make more progress on my way to the conference building.
That was when I realized that the buttons on the traffic lights needed to be pressed each time. If I didn’t press it, the lights for the walkers wouldn’t turn green. This is a clear difference to some of the lights I know from home in Bielefeld (which does exist, just saying). There were pseudo-buttons which you could press or not press, but the lights still turning green. The difference to Dresden now is, that as I was approaching another traffic light, I needed to stop, press the button and wait for the lights to switch, if there wasn’t already someone waiting for it – which turned out to be rarely the case; thus the waiting.
Then I realized, that the button in fact is a similar to a quality gate in more traditional processes. At each gate you have to wait, you have to synchronize back with other parts which are then integrated. But in either case, you seem to have to wait. Then I asked, how would a pseudo-button for quality gates look like? Well, that’s easy, if you do small steps, tiny improvements, and integrate early, often, or even continuously, then you have a pseudo-button. In fact this is the case on Agile projects. You get the feedback from the unit tests during test-driven design. You get the feedback from the story-tests before checking in your changes to the code base. You then get the feedback from the CI-server which runs the tests. On another step you get the feedback from Product Owner and stakeholders during the iteration demonstration or sprint review meeting.
Now, all these feedback loops exist as an automated quality gate. You get the feedback, that you broke something, and you immediately know on what you have focus your immediate attention. On the other hand, when you don’t get any feedback, you also know that everything might be fine, and can continue your work. (This should be the case most of the time.) Quality Gates are automated to large extends in Agile development for good.
The Deliberate Tester – Lunch & Learn
The Software Testing Club put up the seventh episode from my mini-series The Deliberate Tester. In the seventh episode Peter joins a Testing Dojo at a Lunch & Learn and gets to know how to learn collaboratively on a testing team.