Agile Testing

Agile methods are empirical. You must inspect and adapt to make agile work. This requires using effective feedback systems which are vital to your success. Agile teams often suffer from agile feedback systems that are dysfunctional—non-existent, delayed, or no learning from feedback. Satish Thatte explains three agile feedback systems—daily, sprint, and release—and their associated value and challenges. Satish discusses how to improve these feedback systems so they are beneficial to each team member, the project, the program, and the organization. The key is to use templates that capture information and show if the double feedback loops (basic as well as learning feedback loops) are working properly, and then to leverage connections among the agile feedback systems. As a bonus, every delegate receives these templates refined with feedback by industry users during the past six years.

After providing an introduction to several key agile testing concepts—including the Automation Triangle and the Test Automation Quadrants—Geoff Meyer discusses approaches to effectively deliver automated testing. Geoff shares practical insights and demonstrates how they were employed in the test automation strategies developed for several large-scale agile projects at Dell. He shows how the overall test strategy and implementation of each underlying agile concept was influenced by the realities of the project’s organization structure, application architecture, incumbent tools, and tester skillsets. Geoff explores the similarities of the projects from their common goals of establishing automated regression suites, achieving in-sprint automation, and test staffing approaches. More importantly, he delves into the implications of organizational structures and how they led to divergent approaches to test strategy from the choice of automation frameworks to the decisions to automate at the REST/SOAP-based API level or UI level.

Musicians and athletes spend most of their time practicing—not performing. If as software developers we just learn on our job and don’t practice, we will continue to make mistakes on code meant for customers. We must improve the quality of our skills which will, in turn, improve the quality of our code. Mike Clement believes we must take time to practice, allowing ourselves to improve our skills and develop better “code sense.” Learn how the Software Craftsmanship Manifesto provides a framework for us to improve in our craft. By learning a variety of code games, we can assemble a full toolbelt of activities to help us improve. We then can take these games and give others the opportunity to improve and thus raise the level of the whole community. Join Mike to take a whirlwind tour of some different agile code games and discover what it means to become a true software craftsman.