Episode 142: Agile and SSLM at cPrime with Zubin Irani

Craig sits down with Zubin Irani, the CEO of cPrime, at the Agile 2016 conference in Atlanta and chats about:

CPrime is the largest Atlassian implementer and platinum partner
Need to make sure that ALM products work with your process and support and enable it
One of the big gaps in the Coaching world is coaches are staying away from technology – we have to leverage technology
SSLM (Software Service Lifeycle Management) – Agile, DevOps and ALM initiatives are fragmented, they need to interact and have dependencies on each other
5 big trends – Agile beyond development, DevOps is taking centre stage, every company is a software company, digital transformation and the talent crunch
Agile Hardware – how do you build hardware in a more iterative way, how do we think about hardware and software being built together, how do we think about different about hardware design to support the software process (white paper)
The emergence of mobile is driving Agile adoption
Tools and process working together will solve problems

Episode 117: The Changing Role of a Tester with Mark Pedersen

Craig is at the YOW! Connected conference and talks to Mark Pedersen, the CTO at KJR, and they talk all things quality and testing:

the changing role of a tester in an Agile environment, it clarifies the role rather than making it blurrier
in an Agile environment it does not make sense to have a Test Manager role anymore
the number of dedicated testing roles are decreasing, but becoming more important and valuable
most organisations say that they use both waterfall and agile frequently
build your skills in either a quasi analysis / product owner / acceptance criteria role or get up to speed with sensible technical automation tools for your tech stack
TDD – good idea but not many organsations practicing it in a dedicated way, unit testing in most industries is a luxury
BDD – does not make TDD obsolete, defining acceptance criteria upfront helps understand what we need to code
pair programming – does not deliver much benefit from a test perspective, unless the tester has technical expertise, adoption is still very low
YOW! Connected talk “Building Mobile App Test Automation“
mobile testing is challenging and IoT will take it to another level – customer expectations are higher for these devices, they are thought of more like traditional mechanical devices
mobile and IoT is driving the demand for testers to become more technical – more API and distributed technology tests

At the YOW! Connected conference, Craig sits down with Chris van Raay and Tom Brodhurst-Hill and talks about bridging the gaps between developers and designers:

Chris van Raay talk “Bridging the Designer – Developer Divide“
Tom Brodhurst-Hill talk “Design Driven Mobile Development“
Typically most organisations have separated development and design teams which results in a very linear process
Need simple design documentation as a “single source of truth” because you shouldn’t need to specify styles more than once and it helps reduce effort and obtain a consistent design
Use tools such as PaintCode to create a colour palette which serves as documentation as well as a static analysis test
Need leadership to ensure there is an agreed approach, set the standards and create discipline
When building features need to decide when to leave work that is consistent across features, in relation to design, this should be a special amendment to the definition of done
Process can get in the way of achieving good things sometimes
Small thin slices do not work well for design, UX flow is the bare minimum you need, then you can have separate threads of development for front end and back end and evolve the app over time