Tag Archives: Testing

Episode 176: The Lost Tapes – Kanban For One with Sandy Mamoli

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In this previously lost and unreleased podcast from 2012 (we found it on a SD card that was thought to be lost forever), Craig catches up with Sandy Mamoli at Agile 2012 in Dallas, Texas and chat about Personal Kanban and how everything is bigger in Texas. It’s amazing how much hasn’t changed in this time!

TheAgileRevolution-176 (14 minutes)

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Episode 158: Jugaad Agility with Naresh Jain

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Craig is at YOW! Lambda Jam in Sydney and speaks with Naresh Jain, co-founder of the Agile Software Community of India (organising body of Agile India), conference organiser of many other software conferences in India and creator of ConfEngine and they chat about:

  • The original Test Infected article
  • Cruise Control started as an idea to write a cron job to check out code, compile and run tests
  • Without good processes and tools the individuals and interactions become much harder
  • Agile India conference – running since 2005, one of the earliest Agile conferences
  • Agile is a given way to do things, but we are still not seeing the benefits – need to build capability in user first / product thinking, need autonomy to deliver end-to-end customer value (startups within a startup), need to build a learning culture and expert people / craftsmanship and need to focus on continuous delivery
  • Modern Agile (and Naresh’s input into the original article)
  • Indian Agile community – a lot of interesting work happening in the FinTech space and startup in spaces such as health and messaging, a move towards innovation centres from cost centres
  • YOW! West talk “Setting up Continuous Delivery Pipeline for a Large-Scale Mobile App“
  • Code is a liability, need to focus on the problem we are trying to solve rather than perfect code or an over-complicated safety net, allows you to throw away code more easily, frequently and willingly
  • Testing through dogfooding – want to be able to fix things faster rather than safeguard and guess what might break
  • As thought leaders it is our responsibility to challenge our own beliefs, otherwise we stagnate
  • Agility is how you think about the situation around you and be opportunistic about it
  • What is the least I can do to make some progress today – Indian word Jugaad (get away with it)

TheAgileRevolution-158 (53 minutes)

Episode 125: 10 Minutes with Dan North

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dannorthAfter many failed attempts to get him on the podcast, Craig finally catches up with Dan North at YOW! Conference on his way out the door to the airport and in a quick chat they cover:

  • BDD – developing an application by looking at its behaviour from the perspective of its stakeholders (people who’s live you touch)
  • Given When Then – “given” is setting up the world in a well known way, “when” is me interacting with the application as a stakeholder and “then” is what I expect to happen
  • BDD is not the same as writing automated tests, they are orthogonal – “Test-Driven Development Is Not About Testing“
  • Software, Faster – collection of patterns for people who have been around Agile and are asking “now what” – “Software, Faster” book in progress
  • YOW! 2015 talk “Delivery Mapping: Turning the Lights On“

TheAgileRevolution-125 (12 minutes)

Episode 124: Talking Testing with Anne-Marie Charrett

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16069825102_aa54010a22_zCraig is at YOW! Conference and catches up with Anne-Marie Charrett who is well known in the testing community as a trainer, coach and consultant but also for her support of the community:

  • Don Reinertsen talk “Thriving in a Stochastic World“
  • Context-Driven Testing
  • Testing is a verb – it’s a doing thing and not an output, but the challenge is you cannot see doing
  • Anne-Marie’s class in Exploratory Testing
  • Where there is risk and failure, there is a job for testing
  • Exploratory testing – the key is feedback and using the learning to feedback into the next test
  • Agile testing – don’t try and test everything and don’t try and automate everything either, rather adopt a risk based approach
  • Unit testing – the usefulness depends on the programmer and the context and figuring out what you are trying to achieve
  • Sydney Testers Meetup
  • Speak Easy – Speak Easy is a voluntary program designed to increase diversity in tech conferences through dedicated conference spots, mentoring and events
  • YOW! WIT Program
  • WorkVentures – training marginalised youth
  • Testing challenges include microservices (the risk of bounded context and breaking things down and missing the whole) and working together as developers and testers
  • James Lewis podcast “Episode 120: Microservices & The Lean Enterprise with James Lewis“

TheAgileRevolution-124 (39 minutes)

Episode 119: Agile (Raccoon) is Dead with “Pragmatic” Dave Thomas

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davethomasCraig and Tony are at YOW! Conference and get the opportunity to sit down with Dave Thomas, signatory to the Manifesto for Agile Software Development and have a great discussion about:

  • Dave’s talk “Agile is Dead (Long Live Agility)“
  • Agile as a word has become meaningless, don’t follow the off-the-shelf processes, apply small corrections to move forward
  • Story of Stone Soup is like Agile consultancies, the hard work is done by the companies
  • Scrum is a good starting point due to its simplicity
  • Raccoon is a noun, so not a good replacement name for Agile, because you can buy a pound of it
  • 1,000 working on one thing can never be Agile, you have to make enterprises agile before you can run an agile project
  • The values in the Agile Manifesto hold up well, would have been nice to have had more diversity, had no expectation they were going to create something so significant
  • The Agile Manifesto was a reaction to the problems in development at the time, maybe something new is required, it would be a tragic mistake to create Agile Manifesto 2.0, we need to ask what is more relevant today to express our frustrations
  • Agile is a fundamental way of thinking about doing stuff, that’s why it’s important to understand why we are doing it
  • “The Pragmatic Programmer” started as a set of field notes and somehow became a book that still sells well today despite some of the dated examples  and it invented terms like DRY (don’t repeat yourself)
  • The Pragmatic Bookshelf was accidental by saying the dreaded words “how hard could this be”, the strength is knowing nothing about publishing, everything was automated unlike traditional publishers and still runs with 2 main employees, now storyboard books like a movie as the reader is on a learning journey
  • Ruby has a future, but it needs to distinguish itself as a fantastic general purpose programming language, the community is still very friendly and innovative
  • The emphasis and dogma around testing is off-putting, the amount of effort around many tests are not moving people forward

TheAgileRevolution-119 (40 minutes)

 

 

 

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

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mpCraig 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

TheAgileRevolution-117 (37 minutes)

Episode 111: M&Mailbag

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peanutmmCraig and Renee, sitting in a shoe-box sized hotel room in Sydney eating peanut M&Ms, decided to rustle through the mailbag and answer a bunch of outstanding questions.

Note: this episode is not sponsored or endorsed by M&Ms but we certainly enjoy their product!

Crossing The Chasm

  • more and more organisations seem to be crossing the chasm to Agile, but too many are still just doing and not being Agile
  • inimal viable product (MVP) is still the trend word, the next stage is Minimal Viable Experience and then Minimal Viable Robustness to Minimal Marketable Product and finally Continuously Evolving Product
  • Enterprise Transformation Meta Model
  • Agile is a true north concept, not sure that you will ever get there

Suggested reading list on where to start with Agile:

What certification should a new Scrum Master get:

Building your own scaled framework

  • Holacracy and Reinventing Organizations
  • need to answer questions around ensuring quality, growing capability, benefits realisation, etc…
  • at what level do the questions need to be answered
  • Minimal Viable Organisations
  • scale on the operational cadence of the problems of the organisation, not following a framework
  • how often do we check that our approach is meeting our needs

Visualising business analysis in a Scrum team

  • 3 Amigos approach
  • call it what it is if you’re sprint length is longer than it is
  • focus more on Kanban flow

Reading List

  • Renee is reading about climate change (and how that applies to Agile) including “This Changes Everything” by Naomi Klein
  • Craig is reading “CTRL-SHIFT” by  Jessie Shternshus and Mike Bonifer

TheAgileRevolution-111 (71 minutes)

Episode 83: Making Impacts with Gojko Adzic

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GojkoAdzicGojko Adzic “does computers” which means he helps people deliver software and he caught up with Craig on a recent YOW! DepthFirst tour of Australia. Gojko is the author of numerous books including “Bridging The Communication Gap“, “Specification by Example“, “Impact Mapping” and “50 Quick Ideas to Improve Your User Stories“.

  • XP – started with “Extreme Programming Explained” which was really about developers ruling the world – XP is not dead, it won!
  • TDD has crossed the chasm to mainstream
  • Sturgeons Law – 90% of anything is going to be crap
  • Continuous integration and automation has opened up a world of possibilities
  • “Bridging the Communication Gap” – about finding ways to break dysfunctional processes in organisations
  • “Agile Testing” by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory
  • The most valuable companies in the world are software companies
  • It’s more about the right people being involved rather than narrowly defined roles
  • “Specification by Example” – a collaborative way of coming up with good requirements and tests involving a cross functional team
  • Pschologically people perceive that tests come after development – in that case you have already failed
  • BDD – no canonical definition, would love BDD and SBE to be the same thing
  • “Impact Mapping” – based on a Swedish interaction design process – about setting goals and strageies
  • Impact Mapping uptake outside of IT – Marcus Hammarberg on Doctors in Indonesia and Ahmad Fahmy on helping orphanges in Egypt
  • “50 Quick Ideas To Improve Your User Stories” – a lot more to good user stories than just a template
  • Hamburger Slicing – last resort technique for technical story breakdown to think about options for value
  • Product Management is the big missing piece – teams could benefit from doing this better
  • As an industry we produce too much software – need to change the percentage of software that can achieve something big

TheAgileRevolution-83 (45 minutes)

Episode 25: Cultural transformations with Agile

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YoghurtCraig, Tony and Renee debate the role of an Agile Coach and how cultural transformations fit in.

Quotes:

“Management does not know what a system is” – Deming

“The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small, manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one” – Mark Twain

TheAgileRevolution-25 (46 minutes)