Yesterday during my keynote at the Agile Testing Days 2012 I said I see a lot of standups, where testers report on their yesterday’s work in the following way:
Yesterday I tested the thing with the stuff. I found some bugs, and filed them. Today I will test the foo with the bar.
I think this is horrible test reporting. While concluding the fifth beta of Elisabeth Hendrickson‘s upcoming book Explore it! I found a few more hints in the same direction. On the same line I will relate good test reporting during the standup to what for example Michael Bolton talks about when it comes to test reporting – we should tell three stories during test reporting:
In the past I have been more than skeptic about certifications. I even wrote about my minimum requirements for a certification programme that might (or might not) add value in an article called Meaningful Certification?. Despite the split between the two larger organizations (and their early leaders) on Scrum – the Scrum Alliance and Scrum.org – yesterday I noticed that the certification scam has taken on new levels with a program called Certified Scrum Manager (IAPM). Here is my honest critique about it, and I will try to rant as few as possible about it.
Today, a colleague of mine, Norbert Hölsken, started off a discussion in our internal communication channel. He asked:
How do you treat bugs on the taskboard that are found during testing? Create a new test for each bug, and put the test task back in ToDo? Or create a bug, and a bug-follow-up testing task?
As it turns out there are a lot of valid reasons to do it one way or another. Yet, the answer “it depends” does not help – neither a Scrum Coach, nor a tester working in a Scrum environment. So, I started raising some of my experiences and concerns, and some of my other colleagues replied as well.
Skip forward three hours, and I am writing a blog entry on my thoughts about it.
A while ago, I called for some participation on the state of our craft. I promised back then to present some intermediate answers in late January. Here they are.
One of my colleagues made a claim yesterday which I would like to put some numbers on. I raised the question on twitter, and received suspicious answers about the numbers of my colleague. Please forward this survey to anyone you know who is programming: http://www.shino.de/programmer-survey/ It consist of just four question, so you should be able to answer them in a few minutes.
Over twitter I also received the feedback that things are worse for testers. I would like to put numbers on that as well. Therefore I also put up an equally small survey for tester: http://www.shino.de/tester-survey/ Please forward this survey to anyone in the software business that you know of.
From time to time to I will publish some of the results. I aim for end of January for the first set of data.
While Diana Larsen was in Germany in July she spoke about a course she was currently taking called Human Systems Dynamics. Since then some of my colleagues started to dive into it. So did I. I didn’t take the course, but decided to go for some of the books on it. The first one I came across is called Facilitating Organization Change – Lessons from complexity science, and deals with a lot of stuff on complexity science, self-organization, and how to introduce changes in a complex adaptive system (CAS). These are some of my first thoughts after finishing the book.
Some while ago, J.B. Rainsberger posted a case for slack, and that you might be sabotaging your peoples training. I think it was Kent Beck who pointed me to the self-similarity of nature in eXtreme programming explained. In this post I’m going to take a closer look on how we learn, and how nature is self-similar in this regard, and what we may derive from this.
Alistair Cockburn told us about a research in the UK on Scrum. He pointed out to the student, that Scrum is not a process, but something different. This made me thoughtful and I decided to elaborate some more on the terms and reflect on the other Agile methodologies about it.