Home  Agile Journal Effective Agile Testing: Asking the Right Question
Effective Agile Testing: Asking the Right Questions - November 2008
Since the September
issue of this year we’ve moved away from themed issues to mixed-subject
issues where each issue has a variety of articles. This month’s issue is no different; you’ll
find articles on selecting
your first project, questions an effective
Agile tester should ask, a story about a fictional offshore
project, and much more.
Rather than summarizing the articles in my notes, I’d like
to share a story and let you read the summaries below.
Last week I was working with a group who are two years into
an enterprise-wide Agile adoption at a large organization. One of the questions that kept coming up was
a variant on “how do I get person X to do
action Y?”
This was not the only time I’ve been asked this question,
and previously I would go into a long discussion/discovery session to
understand the context of the environment and then share my experiences in
similar situations. This time, however,
I chose not to do so. I answered the
question differently.
My answer was that you cannot get person X to do anything, so just get over it. Instead, my advice was as follows:
You can practice action Y yourself. You can talk to person X and try to find out what his or her goals are and help him
see if action Y addresses those goals
at all. You can try to change the
environment by using big visible charts so that person X can see how not practicing
Y affects the group.
But in the end, person X has to decide to do action Y. If action
Y does not meet person X’s goals,
they will not (and should not) practice it.
(If you are high up the food chain, you can probably force person X to do your bidding, but that is
usually less than fully effective.)
So why this story?
Hopefully it was a bit more interesting than a summary of the articles
you are about to read since they are already paraphrased below anyway. This also is another way to view the articles
we bring to you every month – a chance to see how others have practiced Agile
successfully. Possibly the articles are
a source of validation if you know a person
X who might not see the value of practice
Y.
Finally, the publishing calendar
for 2009 is available. I would like
to remind and encourage all our readers to consider becoming authors by
contributing articles. Since we are now
publishing mixed-subject issues, every month is the right month to submit your
work for publication and feedback from the community. You can read more about what we are looking
for in September’s
Letter from the Editor and if you decide to contribute please review the submission guidelines.
Amr Elssamadisy
Editor in Chief
Agile Journal
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Effective Agile Testing: Asking the Right Questions
When I first started coaching agile teams I found it a challenge to
coach testers. This was understandable because the agile movement was really
developer-centric and much of the resource material reflected that. I spent
time talking with skilled agile testers and watching them in action. A key
thing I found was that they pose questions that no one else thinks to ask. In
this article we will explore those questions and the context in which they are
asked.
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Where to Begin?: Criteria for Choosing a Successful Scrum Pilot
Based on the original work of Kane Mar, "Agile
Project Selection from a Portfolio of Projects"
Ask any Scrum trainer and they'll tell you the same thing: Adopting
Scrum is hard. There are many reasons for this. Chief among them is that Scrum
is so dramatically different-in terms of practices and principles-from
traditional project management paradigms that it requires team members to truly
reorient their attitudes and working behaviors. It's innate to human psychology
...
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Task Estimation: Do or Don't?
Introduction
Lately I've noticed a fair amount of discussion surrounding the
utility of task estimation. The question
seems to be: is it really useful to
estimate the time required to complete tasks, or is it unnecessary and counter
productive to estimate such small units of work? If we're already using
some form of estimation for stories, is task estimation really all that useful,
or is it in fact thinly veiled micro-management?
Read More >> |
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 | The Invisible Project Manager
An Exercise in Agile Facilitation
A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his
work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves. Lao Tzu, Chinese philosopher (604 BC - 531 BC).
The
project manager leads. The project
manager directs. The project manager
plans. The project manager manages. These are the expectations set upon, and
sought out by those that take on the responsibility for delivering software
projects to the B...
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 | Agile: A Mantra for Extreme Change Fuels Successful User Driven Applications
What happens when your
application software change cycle time shrinks from months to hours or
days?
Over the past four
years, we have overseen the deployment of hundreds of Web business applications
all following agile methods. During the
course of these projects, we have faced many challenges and found some
surprising benefits.
This article describes
some of the lessons we have learned and provides advice on how you might
overcome some key challenges in your own...
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 | Offshore and Agile - Real Scenarios
A lot of heated debate is going on topics such as "Can
we develop software using an offshore model using Agile Methodologies?" This
article is my humble attempt to give more insight on this question using a
story to describe a real scenario with some assumptions and with not so real
people....
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 | Top 9 challenges of adopting Scrum (Part 3)
In the previous
two parts (part 1,
and part 2) we
discussed the first six challenges we've encountered implementing Scrum as
coaches with Xebia. In this third and final part we will present the last three
that we found. As in the previous parts the setting is introducing Scrum in
fairly large organizations which are mainly waterfall oriented.
...
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 | BOOK REVIEW: Emergent Design – The Evolutionary Nature of Professional Software Development
by Scott
L. Bain
Scott Bain's recent book Emergent
Design - The Evolutionary Nature of Profaessional Software Development is
a perfect tome for individuals to learn the personal discipline and practices
that underlie the technical practices of Agile development: Refactoring,
Automated-Tests, Design Patterns, Test-Driven Development, Design Principles, and of course Emergent Design. It's all right
there. Throw in a sprinkle of commonality & variability analysis (CVA) ,
...
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