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Monday, June 6 - Tuesday, June 7, 2011
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Agile projects thrive on rapid and frequent feedback. As a result, testing is an essential component of every agile project. Agile testing-related practices include automated regression testing, acceptance test-driven development, test-driven development, continuous integration, and exploratory testing. Just as testing is vital to agile success, test analysts and test automators are integral members of the agile team.
However, traditional test strategies and approaches emphasizing end-stage testing invariably fail when applied in the agile world. Faster release cycles, emerging requirements, continuous change, minimal requirements documentation, and different deliverables require new testing methods, roles, and skills.
This interactive and dynamic two-day Agile Testing Workshop provides in-depth coverage of effective agile testing practices. The workshop is led by a team of experienced agile and testing practitioners and expert consultants with many years of combined agile and testing experience:
• Dawn Cannan, professional agile tester, test automation expert, contributor on the Selenesse project, and passionate blogger
• George Dinwiddie, an agile consultant specializing in team- and skill-building with broad technical experience ranging from embedded firmware to business information technology
• Dale Emery, an agile consultant known for his work on writing maintainable tests as well as using resistance as a resource
• Ken Pugh, a lean-agile consultant with an emphasis on communication and collaboration using acceptance test-driven development
- Discover why so many testers love agile development
- Learn how agile testing-related practices reduce uncertainty and mitigate risk
- Explore how fast feedback and increased visibility increase agility
- Discover how testers, business stakeholders, and developers collaborate in an agile project
- Learn about the current generation of agile-friendly test automation tools
- Discover how to make test automation maintainable
- Learn how acceptance test-driven development clarifies requirements and drives out ambiguity earlier
- Discover how exploratory testing fits within an agile context
- Determine how to transition to agile practices with testing providing progressive feedback
- Learn how much test documentation is needed for an agile project
- Explore the future of agile development and testing within agile
The workshop includes concurrent introductory and advanced sessions, providing new ideas and information for those who are new to agile and for experienced agilists.
The Agile Testing Workshop is appropriate for anyone interested in testing on agile projects including software development managers, test managers and leads, project leaders, ScrumMasters, QA managers and analysts, test analysts, developers involved in test automation, and internal consultants. Attend the conference on Wednesday and Thursday to extend your training and education in agile practices.
Dawn Cannan, George Dinwiddie, Dale Emery, and Ken Pugh
   
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Dawn Cannan, George Dinwiddie, Dale Emery, and Ken Pugh
Start off the Agile Testing Workshop with a bang as your workshop hosts—Dawn Cannan, George Dinwiddie, Dale Emery, and Ken Pugh—deliver short, fast-paced Lightning Talks, sharing their passions for agile testing and offering up a taste of what’s coming during the two-day workshop. You’ll have the opportunity to share your top questions and concerns about agile testing with them and your peers.
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George Dinwiddie and Ken Pugh
When organizations first adopt agile software development, they often have difficulty understanding where testers fit into agile practices. Similarly, when testers join an ongoing agile group, they sometimes have a difficult time knowing how they can add the most value to the team. What is different about testing in an agile environment? What existing practices should we keep? What should we discard? What should we modify? To answer these questions, George and Ken start with what we want testing to accomplish. Keeping in mind the principles and values of the Agile Manifesto, they explore the relationship between testing practices and the practices of programmers and business people participating in agile projects. Join the discussion to develop a better understanding of the big picture of agile testing.
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Dale Emery and Dawn Cannan
Exploratory testing is a testing style in which you learn about the product while simultaneously designing and executing tests, using feedback from previous tests to create the next test. On an agile project, exploratory testing augments the automated tests, giving the team information about the evolving behavior of the software. Dale and Dawn briefly describe exploratory techniques—variable analysis, mindful modeling, and heuristics—and then lead exercises in which you practice these techniques to design great tests on the fly. You’ll have the opportunity to learn-by-doing in an exercise employing Session-based Test Management—a structured approach to keep your exploration focused on what matters to stakeholders, yet flexible enough to adjust to what you learn. Discover how exploratory testing helps you uncover risks and surprises that traditional, preplanned tests often miss.
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Ken Pugh, Ellen Gottesdiener, and George Dinwiddie
Acceptance tests are valuable for business analysts, testers, and customers. They enable team members to collaborate on requirements elicitation and specification, provide early validation of requirements, reduce delays in testing, and increase overall communication among customers and delivery team members. Ken Pugh introduces acceptance test-driven development, explains why it works, and outlines the different roles the team members play in the process. Ken shares examples of how the process clarifies the work to be done and helps create a common domain language. He demonstrates the “given-when-then” style of tests and shows how to use tables to record specific examples of these tests. This joint session for testers and business analysts includes two exercises that allow you to experience creating acceptance tests together.
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Dale Emery and Dawn Cannan
Your situation is unique. Your organization, your processes, and your product are not like anyone else's. Solutions that work for others may not work for you. Dale and Dawn invite you to describe your unique challenges and the details that make them difficult. They’ll discuss how to use agile principles to develop better software and to solve tough, organization-specific problems. Learn how to think about your challenges in an agile way to find creative solutions that will improve your productivity and performance right now.
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Ken Pugh and George Dinwiddie
Just like the underlying code, tests must have the qualities of maintainability and readability. Ken and George explore qualitative ways to evaluate tests that may suggest improvements in their structure. For example, dividing large tests into smaller tests can make them easier to understand. Also, a common setup program can reduce duplication; however, this structure increases dependencies between tests. In a class exercise, you will evaluate existing tests according to these criteria and make suggestions for improvement. During this session, Ken and George will explore additional uses for tests within your project—progress measurement, system documentation, executable specifications, and more.
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Dawn Cannan and Dale Emery
Even though you've "gone agile," your testing group is still organizationally separate from the development team—or worse, matrix managed. Many companies make the decision to develop software in an agile way, yet don't change their organizational structure at all. It can be difficult to interpret the teachings of agile when your team isn't structured the way the books describe. Having observed and worked in a variety of “agile” organizations, Dawn and Dale discuss balancing organizational imperatives with the flat structure of the ideal agile team. With practical approaches to working on a testing team while also a part of an agile development team, they offer strategies for common situations where the actual organization and the ideal collide.
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Dawn Cannan, George Dinwiddie, Dale Emery, and Ken Pugh
We close the day with a review of the topics covered and open the session up for questions and small group discussions. Questions not answered today can be addressed in tomorrow morning’s opening session—Greatest Challenges of Agile Testing.
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Dawn Cannan, George Dinwiddie, Dale Emery, and Ken Pugh
Every agile team has issues with people and process. Developers may not collaborate well with testers; customers may not be able to interact easily to create just-in-time requirements; members of an agile team cannot always be selected to ensure that they innately possess needed skills and capabilities; an organization may support agility in principle and not in practice. In this interactive session, participants first identify issues they are facing today. Then, based on the common issues they are facing and most concerned about, participants self-select into small groups to discuss their challenges in depth. Each group develops ways to approach these issues and improve their teams. At the end, groups share their key results with all.
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Dawn Cannan and George Dinwiddie
The ideal agile project seems pretty simple—a small project, starting from scratch with a co-located team, resulting in great software designed from an agile beginning. What about the rest of us? What about all of the projects that have been in progress for years—touched by many people—and probably without any automated tests at all? What about the projects with teams scattered across the globe? Dawn and George help you identify strategies that address the challenges of the “disconnect” between the ideal agile and the difficult situations you face. Whether you are dealing with a monolithic monster of a software product or developers you’ve never met, join in to explore your technical and people challenges.
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Dale Emery and Ken Pugh
Never forget—test automation is software development. Therefore, much of what we know about writing software also applies to creating automated tests. However, some of the things we know may not be obvious to testers and others whose primary job is not writing code. Which kinds of tests should testers help automate? Which tests are better left for professional developers? How do you build a test system from the bewildering array of available tools, each of which handles only part of the job? How do you automate tests so they remain easy to change as the system’s requirements and implementation change? Dale and Ken share their decades of software development and test automation experience to describe and demonstrate key practices to keep your test automation on track.
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Dawn Cannan and George Dinwiddie
Many automated testing tools are available—from very expensive suites to free, open source software. Dawn and George highlight the demands that the agile development environment places on automated test tools and the characteristics required of the tools to meet these demands. They present an overview of popular test automation frameworks and tools. Starting with a definition of frameworks, tools, and different types of automation, Dawn and George provide examples of each, evaluating them in terms of how they address common challenges of automating tests in a constantly changing environment. Take away a sampling of tools for agile testing and new insights into the ones that will best fit your needs.
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Dale Emery and Ken Pugh
If you don’t participate in the Open Discussion session on Monday, this is your second chance. Your situation is unique. Your organization, your processes, and your product are not like anyone else's. Solutions that work for others may not work for you. Dale and Ken invite you to describe your unique challenges and the details that make them difficult. They’ll discuss how to use agile principles to develop better software and, as well, to solve tough, organization-specific problems. Learn how to think about your challenges in an agile way to find creative solutions that will improve your productivity and performance right now.
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Dawn Cannan, George Dinwiddie, Dale Emery, and Ken Pugh
This workshop's value is in the improvements it helps us make in our daily work. We end the workshop by mining the two days for concrete, practical ideas you can apply immediately when you return to work.
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