Being Agile without Doing Agile (continued)
The most common requests Dawn Haynes gets as a consultant these days are to help testers and teams transition to an agile development process, or to help testers be more effective in “agile-ish” environments. Interestingly, the core answer to these questions starts with forgetting the process for a moment and focusing on yourself and what you’re trying to accomplish. Being agile starts with a mindset and an attitude that drive focus, approaches, and solutions. When you start there, the path to improvement can almost always be summarized as “being more agile”—which is surprisingly independent of whether or not your team follows an agile process. Join Dawn to examine the utility of test cases, defect reports, and test status in an agile context; learn about liminal thinking and how it can work for you and your team; and consider the role of a tester in agile and its evolutionary arc. Let’s explore what it means for a tester and a test team to be more agile—whether or not you “do agile”—and what benefits you can expect if you decide to increase your agility as a tester.
Dawn Haynes is CEO, testing coach, and consultant for PerfTestPlus, Inc. A highly regarded trainer of software testers, Dawn blends experience with a real-world view to provide testers with tools and techniques to help them generate new approaches to common and complex software testing problems. Passionate about improving the state of testing, Dawn engages with testers through writing, social media, training, meetups, and testing conferences worldwide. Selected in 2010 as one of twelve women of influence in Software Test and Performance magazine, Dawn is a founding member of the International Society for Software Testing, and a lifetime member, former secretary, and director of the Association for Software Testing.