How does QA fit in?
Liz! asked a question. She and her team are starting agile and she can't get much info on where QA fits into to Agile. First, I want to reiterate Jeff Sutherland's concern, that he biggest problem is that too many teams are not getting to working product (working software) within a Sprint (a 1 to 4 week consistent timebox). In my view, the absolute minimum Definition of Done for a typical software...
Agile Software Development Saves Lives!
Ahem. Actually that's a bit of an exaggeration. I have to be honest with you. Agile software development probably doesn't really save lives. There, you heard it from me first. I just felt like being melodramatic... Someone once joked with me that "agile is...
Agile Testing versus Waterfall Test Phases
I have recently been asked by a tester how agile testing compares to the various test phases in more traditional, waterfall development projects. For instance, after the code has been unit tested, are there several testing phases, such as system, integration and...
Advantages of Agile Software Development for Testers
This is a guest blog post from Ray Claridge, who writes a really interesting blog about agile testing caled Tester Troubles.Over to Ray...Moving into agile software development can be a daunting experience for any tester, and crawling the Internet for crumbs of...
Putting the *Analyst* into Test Analyst
For years, I've given Software Testers in my teams the official job title of Test Analyst, or something along those lines. Yet (informally) I've always referred to them as Testers. Only in more recent years - and especially since adopting Agile Software Development...
Agile Testing: The Changing Role of Testers
In my opinion, the most challenging role to adapt to agile development is the role of Tester. That's because agile development contradicts so many things that many Testers have been taught is 'best practice'. Testers might typically have gone through some recognised...
"One Team"
One of the key principles of agile development, and particularly Scrum, is the concept of "One Team". The Scrum team should include all key roles for the product, wherever they report to, including Product Owner, Product Manager, Test Analyst, Developers, Business...
User Story Example
I recently described User Stories and the composition of a User Story Card - Card, Conversation and Confirmation. I'm not really sure if you would consider this user story example to be good, bad or indifferent - I guess it depends what you're used to - but here...
Developers Can’t Test For Toffee!
In the more traditional world of managing software development projects, it is widely acknowledged that developers can’t test for toffee! Yet agile development methods increasingly seem to require or imply that all people in the project team should test, including...
Why Agile Testers Should Be In At The Start
In my experience, some people implement agile principles within the development team itself, but leave other key roles (for instance business users or testers) out of, or on the fringes, of the agile team. Earlier in my blog I wrote that active user involvement...
Testing Testing 123 (test driven development)
XP (eXtreme Programming) advocates Test Driven Development, where test cases are written before the code. Radical, huh? If you think about it, it makes complete sense. Assuming you are planning to write test cases anyway, it’s no more effort than writing them...
