Many product backlogs are nothing more than glorified to-do lists. Teams have lost the idea of prioritizing real business value, focusing only on finishing stories and accumulating story points. If this sounds like your team, join David Hussman and Janet Gregory as they drive a stake into the heart of lame backlogs and breathe new life into test-driven thinking that is meaningful to testers, developers, product owners, and others. Using real-world examples, David and Janet combine their shared experiences to teach tools you can use to fuse centered product thinking with end-to-end testing. These techniques include: developing test-driven user experiences, improving product discovery (backlog grooming) sessions with testing talk, adding story clarity with examples and tests, validating requirements with tests, connecting program teams by decomposing product ideas into small testable stories, and recomposing them to validate product level learning. Because we learn by doing and questioning as we go, show up ready to work. Bring your failing product backlog stories and discuss them, too.
Janet Gregory
Agile testing coach and practitioner Janet Gregory (@janetgregoryca) is the coauthor of Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams and a contributor to 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know. Janet specializes in showing agile teams how testers can add value in areas beyond critiquing the product. For the past ten years, she has been working with teams to transition to agile development. Janet teaches agile testing courses and tutorials worldwide, contributes articles to leading publications, and enjoys sharing her experiences at conferences and user group meetings worldwide. Find more information at janetgregory.ca or visit her blog.
Agile teams deliver “potentially” shippable software at the end of every iteration—typically, one to four weeks but possibly as often as daily. This goal can't be achieved without comprehensive automated tests, a place where many teams struggle. The challenge of automating functional regression tests even frightens many experienced and competent testers. But it doesn’t have to be this way. By combining collaborative teamwork with appropriate tools and design approaches, you not only can automate regression tests, but the team also can use test automation tools to enhance exploratory testing. Janet Gregory describes how to implement automation early in the project to guide development by providing real-time feedback to the team. Janet explores techniques for determining which tests to automate and which should remain manual. She demonstrates with examples how to design automated tests for maximum effectiveness and ease of maintenance. By the end of this session, you’ll understand how to fit automation activities within each iteration so testing keeps up with coding.
How is testing different for successful agile projects? How can agile development teams employ testers’ skills and experience for maximum project value? Janet Gregory describes key factors she has identified for agile teams to succeed and explains the whole-team approach of agile development that enables testers to do the most effective job. Then, Janet explores the “agile testing mindset” that contributes to a tester’s success. She describes the different kinds of information that testers on an agile team need to obtain, create, and provide for the team and product owner. Learn test automation’s role in the fast-paced development of agile projects, including regression and acceptance tests. By adhering to core agile practices while keeping the bigger picture in mind, testers add significant value to and help ensure the success of agile projects.