You’ve “gone agile” and have been relatively successful. So, how do you know how well your team is really doing? And how do you continuously improve your practices? When things get rocky, how do you handle the challenges without reverting to old habits? You realize that the path to high-performance agile testing isn’t easy or quick. It also helps to have a guide. So consider this workshop your guide to ongoing, improved, and sustained high-performance. Join Bob Galen and Mary Thorn as they share lessons from their most successful agile testing transitions. Explore actual team case studies for building team skills, embracing agile requirements, fostering customer interaction, building agile automation, driving business value, and testing at-scale—all building agile testing excellence. Examine the mistakes, adjustments, and the successes, and learn how to react to real-world contexts. Leave with a better view of your team’s strengths, weaknesses, and where you need to focus to improve.
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].
With the adoption of agile practices in many organizations, the test automation landscape has changed. Bob Galen explores current disruptors to traditional automation strategies, and discusses relevant and current adjustments you need to make when developing your automation business case. Open source tools are becoming incredibly viable and beat their commercial equivalents in many ways―not only in cost, but also in functionality, creativity, evolutionary speed, and developer acceptance. Agile methods have fundamentally challenged our traditional automation strategies. Now we must keep up with incremental and emergent systems and architectures and their high rates of change. Bob explores new automation strategies, examining strategies for both greenfield applications and those pesky legacy projects. Learn how to wrap a business case and communication plan around them so you get the support you need. Leave the workshop with a serious game-plan for delivering on the promise of agile test automation.
In his journeys, Bob Galen has discovered that testing takes on many forms. Some organizations have no automated tests and struggle to run massive manual regression tests within very short iterative releases. Other organizations are going “all in”―writing thousands of acceptance tests in Gherkin. The resulting imbalance in their testing approaches undermines an organization’s efficiency, effectiveness, and delivery nimbleness. Bob shares ideas to bring balance to testing. He explores the choices: manual vs. automated testing, designed and scripted test cases vs. exploratory tests, and thoroughly planned test projects vs. highly iterative reactive ones. Bob describes how to balance traditional test leadership with an iterative and whole team view to add value. And finally, he explores the balance of the gatekeeper vs. leading the collaboration with stakeholders to find the right requirements that solve their problems. Take away a strategic approach to structure your testing and a renewed understanding of how testing fits into a healthy and balanced culture.
The role of the Product Owner in Scrum is only vaguely defined—owning the Product Backlog and representing the “customer.” In many organizations, Product Owners go it alone, trying their best to represent business needs to their teams. What’s often missing is a collaborative connection between the team’s testers and the Product Owner—a connection in which testers help to define and refine requirements, broaden the testing landscape and align it to customer needs, provide a conduit for collaboration between the customer and the team, assure that the team is building the right thing, and help demonstrate complete features. This relationship is central to the team and facilitates transparency to help gain feedback from the entire organization. Join seasoned agile coach Bob Galen as he shares techniques for doing just this. Return with new ideas and techniques for helping your Product Owner and team deliver better received and higher value products—not just by testing but by fostering collaboration.