Agile Journal March 2010

“Profit in business comes from repeat customers, customers that boast about your project or service, and that bring friends with them.” – Dr. W. Edwards Deming

“Quality is everyone's responsibility.” – Dr. W. Edwards Deming

“You cannot inspect quality into the product; it is already there.” – Dr. W. Edwards Deming

“It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and then do your best.” – Dr. W. Edwards Deming

Dr. W. Edwards Deming, who is considered by many to be the father of modern Quality Management, simplified Quality Management into the iterative and incremental quality improvement cycle of Plan, Do, Check/Study, Act (PDCA). Fundamentally, PDCA increases the frequency of feedback loops, reduces waste and helps to maintain and advance quality

Dr. Deming’s quality improvement cycle was based on the work of Walter A. Shewhart. Dr. Deming edited a series of lectures delivered by Shewhart at United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), Statistical Method from the Viewpoint of Quality Control, into a book published in 1939.

This month’s edition is devoted to Agile Quality Management and Testing.

Janet Gregory and Lisa Crispin, co-authors of Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams (Addison-Wesley, 2009) share with us their insights about QA and Testing in their article titled: “What’s a Tester without a QA Team?”.

Robert Small and Janet Gregory, cleverly and insightfully, share with us a conversation between the two of them with respect to “QA vs. Testing in Agile Projects”.

My article, “Quality Management and Testing in the World of Scrum and Agile Product Development,” shares how Quality Management is inherent or self-evident in self-directing and self-organizing agile teams, as the team iteratively and incrementally validates and verifies the team is doing the right things, doing those things right and adapting every step of the way; while delivering commercial or operational value incrementally.

The product director of test automation at Micro Focus, Joachim Herschmann, in his article “Managing the Transition to Agile”, shares with us his insights about the many challenges that an established software organization faces when shifting to agile. He helps us take a look at some major considerations that any enterprise making an agile shift must tackle; Quality in Agile – A new paradigm for QA being one of the areas to consider:

• Empowering self-managing teams in a distributed environment
• Measuring the benefits
• Applying Agile in a heterogeneous tooling environment
• Planning in an Agile world
• Quality in Agile – A new paradigm for QA
• Managing a successful transition

Ken Pugh, in his article, “An Introductory Acceptance Test”, describes an example of an acceptance test and four ways that an acceptance test can be executed.

Mike Cohn in his article “Continuous Testing: Building Quality into Your Projects” shares with us why testing at the end doesn’t work, the test automation pyramid, and what building in quality looks like.

Geoffrey Bourne, in his article “Agile Developer’s Journal: A Day In The Life”, walks us through a typical “Day in the Life” of an agile developer, specifically at the mid point of an Iteration cycle.  Including insights on test-driven development and continuous integration.

Finally, Roman Pichler, in his article “Getting the Product Backlog Ready for Sprint Planning”, shares that carefully preparing the product backlog for the upcoming sprint planning meeting is key to creating successful product. It ensures that the sprint planning meeting is effective resulting in a strong and realistic commitment.

Check out the future editions of the Agile Journal, as Mr. Pichler will share additional articles based on his forthcoming book, Agile Product Management with Scrum: Creating Products that Customers Love.

Have a great reading experience!

Your agile buddy and editor,
Russell Pannone
Editor
Agile Journal