Agile Testing

Tutorials

MD Specification by Example: Mastering Agile Testing

Nate Oster, CodeSquads, LLC

Mon, 11/10/2014 - 8:30am

On agile teams, testers can struggle to keep up with the pace of development if they continue employing a waterfall verification process―finding bugs after development. Nate Oster challenges you to question waterfall assumptions and replace a “test last” mentality with “specification by example.” Practice “test first” by writing executable specifications for a new feature before development begins. Learn to switch from tests as verification to tests as specification and guide development with concrete examples written in the language of your business.

ME Build Product Backlogs with Test-Driven Thinking—and More NEW

David Hussman, DevJam

Mon, 11/10/2014 - 8:30am

Many product backlogs of user stories are nothing more than glorified to-do lists. Teams have lost the idea of prioritizing real business value and, instead, focus only on finishing stories and accumulating story points. Join David Hussman as he drives a stake into the heart of lame backlogs and breathes new life into test-driven thinking that is meaningful to testers, developers, product owners, and others. Using real-world examples, David shares his experiences and teaches tools you can use to fuse centered-product thinking with end-to-end testing.

TH Agile Project Failures: Root Causes and Corrective Actions

Jeff Payne, Coveros, Inc.

Tue, 11/11/2014 - 8:30am

Agile initiatives always begin with the best of intentions—accelerate delivery, better meet customer needs, or improve software quality. Unfortunately, some agile projects do not deliver on these expectations. If you want help to ensure the success of your agile project or get an agile project back on track, this session is for you. Jeff Payne discusses the most common causes of agile project failure and how you can avoid these issues—or mitigate their damaging effects.

Keynotes

K2 The Roots of Agility

Rob Myers, Agile Institute

Wed, 11/12/2014 - 10:00am

What we mean by Agile is becoming less and less clear. Rob Myers shares sixteen years of history and observation, noting the amazingly diverse ideologies and practices that people now include under this umbrella term. Agile started with the earliest notions of iterative-and-incremental, inspect-and-adapt principles and practices from Scrum. It now includes the intensive engineering disciplines of XP that have recently branched off into the Software Craftsmanship movement. Along the way, agile grafted in lean principles and saw the flowering of the elegantly simple Kanban approach.

Concurrent Sessions

AT4 Establishing an Agile Testing Culture

Leigh Ishikawa, TripAdvisor

Thu, 11/13/2014 - 10:00am

Many resources describe how to accelerate performance of your development organization through adoption of agile methodologies, but very few cover testing in a practical manner. And those that do generally focus on technical details, leaving out how to build an agile testing culture while facing numerous adoption challenges. Leigh Ishikawa describes how an organization needs to rethink testing in the agile world. He begins by taking a holistic look at how different groups combine in an agile testing culture.

AT8 Integrating Performance Engineering and Testing into Agile

Arun Shanmugam

Thu, 11/13/2014 - 11:30am

Performance engineering and testing are a set of activities by which we design, test, and implement the most optimal system that meets the expected performance goals, based on planning and estimation coupled with tests to verify the system’s capabilities. Although the conventional approach to performance testing works well for traditional delivery models, it is ineffective in agile as it involves testing and tuning near the end of development.

AT11 Assessing Agile Engineering Practices

Rob Myers, Agile Institute

Thu, 11/13/2014 - 1:30pm

Organizations are often reluctant to adopt the more challenging agile engineering practices—first seen together in Extreme Programming and later adopted by the Scrum Alliance as the Scrum Developer Practices. These practices are difficult to implement and sustain, and the benefits are often vague, subtle, and measurable only after months of disciplined effort. For an engineering practice to provide real organizational value, it must effectively address real throughput constraints.

AT16 Test Automation in Agile: A Successful Implementation

Melissa Tondi, Denver Automation and Quality Engineering

Thu, 11/13/2014 - 3:00pm

Many teams feel that they are forced to make an either/or decision when it comes to investing time to automate tests versus executing them manually. Sometimes a “silver bullet” tool is purchased, and testers are forced to use it when there may be a better option; other times unskilled team members are designated the automation engineers; and often there is a lack of good guidance on what to automate. These pitfalls cause product owners to de-prioritize those tasks when there’s a better way.