Much of the work of moving traditional test teams toward agile methods is focused on the individual tester. Often, the roles of test director, test manager, test team leader, and test-centric project manager are marginalized―but not in this session where we’ll focus on agile testing from the test leader’s perspective. Join experienced agile test leader and long-time coach Bob Galen to explore the central leadership challenges associated with agile adoption: how to transform your team’s skills toward agile practices, how to hire agile testers, how to create a “whole-team” view toward quality by focusing on executable requirements, and how to create powerful doneness criteria. Beyond the tactical leadership issues, Bob explores strategies for becoming a partner in agile adoption pilot projects, making changes to test automation strategies, and reinventing your traditional planning and metrics for more agile-centric approaches that engage stakeholders.
Bob Galen
An agile methodologist, practitioner, and coach based in Cary, NC, Bob Galen helps guide companies in their adoption of Scrum and other agile methodologies and practices. Bob is a principal agile evangelist at Velocity Partners, a leading agile nearshore development partner; president of RGCG; and frequent speaker on software development, project management, software testing, and team leadership at conferences and professional groups. He is a Certified Scrum Coach, Certified Scrum Product Owner, and an active member of the Agile and Scrum Alliances. In 2013 Bob published Scrum Product Ownership–Balancing Value from the Inside Out. Reach him at [email protected].
Currently much of agile adoption—coaching, advice, techniques, and training―revolves around the agile teams. Leaders are typically ignored, marginalized, or, in the worst cases, vilified. Bob Galen contends that there is a central and important role for managers and effective leadership within agile environments. In this workshop, we’ll explore the patterns of mature agile managers and leaders—those who understand servant leadership and how to effectively support, grow, coach, and empower their agile teams in ways that increase the teams’ performance, accountability, and engagement. We’ll investigate training and standards for agile adoption, and situations and guidelines for when to trust the team and when to step in and provide guidance and direction. We’ll examine the leader’s role in agile at-scale and with distributed agile teams. Good leadership is central to sustaining your agile adoption; bad leadership can render it irrelevant or a failure. To inspire you and your teams, join Bob to walk the path of the good and to examine the patterns of the bad.
One of the challenges associated with testing agile projects is selecting test techniques that “fit” the dynamic nature of agile practices. How much functional and non-functional testing should you do? What is the appropriate mix of unit, integration, regression, and system testing? How do you balance these decisions in an environment that fosters continuous change and shifting priorities? Bob Galen has discovered that session-based exploratory testing (SBET) thrives in agile projects and supports risk-based testing throughout development. SBET excels at handling dynamic change while finding the more significant technical—and business value—defects. Join in and learn how to leverage SBET for test design and as an all-purpose agile testing technique. Bob explores the whole-team execution view that SBET fosters and demonstrates techniques for rolling out this technique across large-scale projects and teams.