Scrum Master: “Are you sure it’s going to take this long? The product owner wants it done in the next Sprint and I already told her it won’t be a problem.” I have 3 issues with this kind of statement. First, it seems that the Scrum Master is acting as the intermediary between the Product Owner…
Developer: “Last Sprint I delivered 18 story points all on my own!” This post will not be about story points. I will leave the story points are evil discussion for another time. Instead I want to focus on the intent behind such a statement. And by intent, I am referring to the proud declaration and feeling…
Bizarro Scrum is like Bizarro world where everything appears to be the opposite of what it should be. It is about common day to day situations that a lot of Scrum teams experience when they transition to Scrum. In this Tales of the Bizarro Scrum blog series, I’ll highlight statements that team members make that on…
At the 2019 Global Scrum Gathering in Vienna and at AgileDC 2019 in Washington, DC, I presented on Test Driven Development. Below is the abstract of the talk, along with the presentation slides. AgileDC 2019 Abstract: Have you tried TDD? Do you hate it? Do you have a hard time applying it in practice? Do you…
At the 2019 Global Scrum Gathering in Austin, TX, I presented on Agile Testing. Below is the abstract of the talk, along with links to the Agile Testing blog series and the presentation slides. 2019 Austin Global Scrum Gathering Abstract: Many teams struggle with fitting in testing activities inside of a Sprint. They end up doing…
To summarize, here are the top 8 things to consider when developing your Agile testing strategy to enable you to continuously deliver a quality working product increment at the end of every Sprint Testing in not a phase 2. Testing is everyone’s responsibility 3. Testing starts on day 1 4. Do automate all scripted tests 5.…
Most manual testing should be spent on Usability and Exploratory Testing. These types of tests are non-scripted and thus cannot be automated. These tests need human interaction, observation, and analysis. With usability testing, a human needs to verify that the design, layout, and user interface of a business feature is intuitive, easy to understand, easy to…
When you are coming up with a testing strategy for green field applications, you should follow the testing triangle or pyramid. For legacy application, a different strategy is needed. Writing tons and tons of unit tests when working with a very large application with zero tests is very costly and results in very little benefits. A…
Acceptance test driven development takes the TDD practice and applies it to acceptance tests. On day 1 of the Sprint, before we begin coding a particular user story, we start by reviewing the acceptance criteria and thinking about how we will verify via tests that this story is complete. Typically, a single acceptance criteria might map…
Requirements and tests are just two sides of the same coin. You can’t have a user story or requirement without an acceptance criteria (test). These two meld into executable specification. Using gherkin syntax (given,when,then) we can represent requirements using examples and create specifications by example. As a potential customer I want to collect books in a…
In many situations, there are a lot of business rules that need to be tested. Say we want to test that the correct discounts get applied based on a certain number of items that are in a shopping cart. To test these rules, most testers will go through the UI and hop through several steps to…
Test driven development is a programming approach where before the developer writes any code, she first writes an automated test. This test will fail at first because no code exists. Then she writes enough code to make the test pass. After that she might want to clean up or refactor her approach, all along ensuring that…
Testing is everyone’s responsibility. The entire team works collectively to develop a quality product. Most of the automation is done by the people writing the code using an approach known as Test Driven Development or Test Driven Design (TDD). This includes unit, integration, component, and system tests. These tests verify that the application works as intended.…
What does your task board say about your team? Many teams have a separate testing column. This indicates that we are still doing hand-offs from development to testing and that testing is an afterthought. Testing is not a phase that happens at the end of a project and it’s not a phase that happens at the…
Most teams today use an inverted pyramid where most of the tests are manual User Acceptance Tests and System tests and are manually executed via the UI. Unit tests are non-existent or are too few to be beneficial. In order to have a maintainable test suite, as explained in this post, the base of our pyramid…