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Agile Testing
Bob Galen, iContact
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Don’t let anyone tell you differently: Agile testing is hard! First, we have to get over the misconception that you don’t need testers within agile teams. Then, we have to integrate testers with the developers and engender a holistic quality approach. And those are only the challenges when the going is easy! In more difficult contexts, testing in agile environments is—well, even more difficult. Bob Galen explores how to handle testing in difficult contexts—lack of test automation capabilities, agile in highly regulated environments, testing when your team is spread globally and real-time interactions are nearly impossible, and more. He describes contexts and approaches for blending existing, traditional testing techniques with their agile counterparts. With real-world examples, Bob describes how teams have achieved a good working balance between the two—for example, in test planning and quality metrics reporting. If your agile project is in a difficult testing context, come with your big issues and expect some new options, but no silver bullets. Remember—it’s hard!
Learn more about Bob Galen
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Agile Implementation
Skip Angel, BigVisible Solutions
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When adopting agile software development, many of the agile roles and practices focus on the team and its members. So, where does that leave the managers—project managers, software managers, IT directors, etc? Based on his many years as an agile coach, Skip Angel answers these questions and explores the role of leadership in software development. Skip discusses common challenges agile team face and how managers within the organization are needed to address those challenges. Explore areas in which both the team and the organization value leadership: team structure and reporting; coordination among teams and teams of teams; team space, facilities, and infrastructure; mentoring and training; and optimizing processes, especially where they touch other parts of the organization. If you are a manager or expect to be a manager in an agile development environment, there is an important place for you—if you are willing to define your responsibilities in a new way.
Learn more about Skip Angel
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Agile Development Techniques
David Yancey, Sogeti, Inc.
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Test-driven Development (TDD) has proven valuable on many development projects for more than ten years. Unfortunately, even today, many teams do not practice it. They give a myriad of excuses for not making TDD a part of their everyday practice. David Yancey reviews some of the more common excuses: “There’s not enough time allotted in this project”, “It’s impossible with this code base”, “I don’t know where to start”, “TDD only works on green field development projects”, and he will demonstrate how to overcome these excuses in a team environment. David shares a proven method for becoming proficient with TDD within a project or system. Learn the steps of this method to re-factor your existing code base into testable code; add new, testable modules to existing code bases; and start new projects with TDD. With TDD as a part of your everyday practice, your team will achieve the goal of testable code with simpler designs and fewer defects.
Learn more about David Yancey
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Special Topics
Monica Yap, SolutionsIQ
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Do you want a successful product delivery—one that has cost-effective and prioritized product features, that has support from the organization, and acceptance from key stakeholders? If so, you need an effective and available product owner (PO) on your Scrum projects. While good POs work with the team to foster high productivity and quality, a bad PO can destroy the project. Bad POs manifest ineffective or counter-productive practices known as anti-patterns. Monica Yap reveals a set of common PO anti-patterns, discusses how to recognize them by their smells, explores the negative impacts they cause, and identifies ways to address them quickly. Monica shares these unfortunately all too common anti-patterns—The Absent Product Owner, Copy The Last One, The Churning Backlog, The Waffling Definition of “Done”, No Single Product Owner, and Not Enough Stakeholders. Learn the necessary people and organizational changes you’ll need to make in order to resolve these issues.
Learn more about Monica Yap
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Agile Testing
Anutthara Bharadwaj, Microsoft
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During the past few years, exploratory testing (ET) has gained popularity as one of the most efficient styles of testing for smaller agile development teams. It has a proven advantage of finding defects faster over larger areas of the software. However, exploratory testing is not a mainstay in large-scale, enterprise product testing. Anutthara Bharadwaj explores some of the myths surrounding ET—lack of planning, misconstruing exploration as ad-hoc testing, lack of metrics, deficiency of actionable data in defect reports, and more. Anu addresses these myths with real data from a case study of the Microsoft Visual Studio ALM team that adopted ET over a two-year product cycle on a team with more than one-hundred engineers with an enterprise product servicing several thousand customers. Anu draws from ET charters they applied on the product, what kind of metrics they kept, and how they integrated ET with their existing test practices.
Learn more about Anutthara Bharadwaj
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Agile Implementation
Bob Hartman, Agile For All, LLC
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Is your agile team not reaching their potential? They may be suffering from internal dysfunctions that contribute to less than optimal results. When core dysfunctions are left to fester, the end result may be a late or failed project—and the cause will be chalked up to “that's just the way agile sometimes is.” Based on his coaching work with hundreds of agile teams, Bob Hartman presents an agile team dysfunction model and identifies the five most common dysfunctions—Leave me in my silo, When we communicate it’s only by email, Others make commitments for us, Don't blame me because I didn't do it, and Worship the heroes. Bob shows how to determine dysfunctions, communicate them, and, most importantly, help teams get past them. Learn how teams can reach their full potential and even achieve greatness once they fully understand their weaknesses, and embrace practices and efforts necessary to overcome them.
Learn more about Bob Hartman
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Agile Development Techniques
Eric Jimmink, Ordina ICT
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Many agile teams fail to meet customer expectations by releasing products before they are complete. Eric Jimmink coaches teams to treat the Definition of Done (DoD) as a learned and required practice. The DoD must reflect both the team’s ambitions and the customer’s demands for a ready-to-release product. Defining “Done” gives direction to the team, manages customer expectations, and secures the value that is promised to the business. Setting measurable quality standards helps emphasize what the business really needs in a production product rather than the low price for which it can be built. Eric has found that early test execution is paramount in achieving the quality goals set in the DoD. He shares his practical experiences in creating a meaningful DoD and breaks the “waterfallacy” of exploring after checking. Join Eric to find out how his company is turning repeatable, high-quality software product delivery into a competitive advantage.
Learn more about Eric Jimmink
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Special Topics
Alan Shalloway, Net Objectives
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An enterprise agile initiative requires a higher level strategic, portfolio, product, and team perspective. Lean software development integrates all of these perspectives into a cohesive, actionable whole. It does this through a combination of Lean-Science, Lean-Management, Lean-Team methods, and Lean-Learning. Alan Shalloway shows how these four aspects of lean form the basis for enterprise agility at all the levels. Lean-Science focuses on the laws present in all software development. Lean-Management creates the opportunity for management to contribute to the context within which teams work. Lean-Team methods are actualized in the Kanban approach. Lean-Learning enables all levels of the organization to learn how to improve their methods. Alan shows how these four perspectives work together so that enterprise software development efforts focus on building the right software in the right way and continue to improve the process of doing so.
Learn more about Alan Shalloway
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Agile Testing
Shannon Prue, Onpoint On Demand, and Dawn Cannan, 42 Lines
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Automated tests are a foundation of agile software development. Many experts teach that developers should write unit tests and testers should write higher-level tests. However, many of the practices, such as test-driven development and pair programming, say little about how programmers and testers could work together. Shannon Prue (developer) and Dawn Cannan (tester) describe and demonstrate the interactions between the developer and tester pairing to implement a user story. Early in the process they agree on story scope, develop a shared vocabulary, and work together to understand the technical and logical details. The tester learns the developer’s approach to solving the problem and begins to design the associated test approach. The developer learns what will be tested, resulting in more solid production code from the beginning. As they write tests and code, Shannon and Dawn show specific examples of how pairing helps prevent defects from ever getting into the code.
Learn more about Shannon Prue and Dawn Cannan
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Agile Implementation
Jurgen Appelo, JoJo Ventures BV
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Although by definition self-organizing agile teams create their own rules, they must operate under constraints of their organization, the technology, and other external factors. To achieve great results, however, the team and its members need something more—call it discipline, maturity, craftsmanship, or competence. We all know that an incompetent person can make a mess of any great process and that a highly competent person can be successful within most process models. Using complexity research and the metaphor of vehicle transportation systems, Jurgen Appelo describes seven organizational approaches you can use for competence development: self-development, coaching from experienced practitioners, certification by external bodies, social pressure from peers, infrastructure support, day-to-day supervision, and management (leadership). In the context of projects run by self-organizing teams, Jurgen gives examples and discusses the pros and cons of each approach. Going further Jurgen explores ways to optimize competency on multiple levels and in multiple dimensions, and how to implement organizational structures that support—rather than obstruct—competence development.
Learn more about Jurgen Appelo
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Agile Development Techniques
Pramod Sadalage, ThoughtWorks
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If you’ve had difficulty applying agile methods to the database side of development, you’re not alone. Most developers see the database as an obstacle to—not a part of—agile development. Pramod Sadalage shows how to apply agile development principles to the database, thereby making the database an integral part of the application development effort. To allow for rapidly changing requirements, Pramod explains how you can make the database and its data more flexible. He shares how to set up processes so that the database team can version control their work, make sure database code gets tagged along with the application code, and create database change deployment packages. With code and examples, Pramod describes how to apply the following agile practices to the database: pair programming, continuous integration, refactoring, database version control, automated database sandbox creation, test-driven development, behavior-driven database development, automated testing, and automated database migration. Join in and get your database development on the agile track.
Learn more about Pramod Sadalage
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Special Topics
Tim Wingfield, Pillar Technology
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Lean software development practices are gaining momentum—with good reason—and many software teams are learning to use Kanban to help manage development and reduce waste. Sharing his experiences—both good and bad—implementing Kanban at Pillar Technology, Tim Wingfield explains how this practice can help you rapidly refine and improve your development and delivery processes. According to Tim, Kanban, which embodies the seven principles of lean software development, can help you identify practices—context switching, thrashing, and bottlenecks—that may be slowing down your team. Join with Tim to explore the concepts of Kanban, including queue limits, trigger points, and value stream maps. Based on the experiences Tim and his organization faced and overcame to implement Kanban technques, you’ll take back a practical grounding in Kanban and a realistic view of how to implement it in your organization.
Learn more about Tim Wingfield
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