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STARWEST 2011: Seven Key Factors for Agile Testing Success What do testers need to do differently to be successful on an agile project? How can agile development teams employ testers’ skills and experience for maximum value to the project? Janet Gregory describes the seven key factors she has identified for testers to succeed on agile teams. She explains the whole-team approach of agile development that enables testers to do their job more effectively. Then, Janet explores the “agile testing mindset” that contributes to a tester’s success. She describes the different kind of information that testers on an agile team need to obtain, create, and provide for the team and product owner. Learn the role that test automation plays in the fast-paced development within agile projects, including regression and acceptance tests. By adhering to core agile practices while keeping the bigger picture in mind, testers add significant value to and help ensure the success of agile projects.
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Janet Gregory, DragonFire, Inc.
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The Whats, Whys and Hows of Kanban Lean software development practices are gaining momentum-with good reason-and many software teams are learning to use Kanban to help manage development and reduce waste. Sharing his experiences-both good and bad-implementing Kanban at Pillar Technology, Tim Wingfield explains how this practice can help you rapidly refine and improve your development and delivery processes. According to Tim, Kanban, which embodies the seven principles of lean software development, can help you identify practices-context switching, thrashing, and bottlenecks-that may be slowing down your team. Join with Tim to explore the concepts of Kanban, including queue limits, trigger points, and value stream maps. Based on the experiences Tim and his organization faced and overcame to implement Kanban technques, you'll take back a practical grounding in Kanban and a realistic view of how to implement it in your organization.
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Tim Wingfield, Pillar Technology
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Agile Database Development If you've had difficulty applying agile methods to the database side of development, you're not alone. Most developers see the database as an obstacle to-not a part of-agile development. Pramod Sadalage shows how to apply agile development principles to the database, thereby making the database an integral part of the application development effort. To allow for rapidly changing requirements, Pramod explains how you can make the database and its data more flexible. He shares how to set up processes so that the database team can version control their work, make sure database code gets tagged along with the application code, and create database change deployment packages.
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Pramod Sadalage, ThoughtWorks Inc
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Pair Development: How Programmers and Testers Benefit Automated tests are a foundation of agile software development. Many experts teach that developers should write unit tests and testers should write higher-level tests. However, many of the practices, such as test-driven development and pair programming, say little about how programmers and testers could work together. Shannon Prue (developer) and Dawn Cannan (tester) describe and demonstrate the interactions between the developer and tester pairing to implement a user story. Early in the process they agree on story scope, develop a shared vocabulary, and work together to understand the technical and logical details. The tester learns the developer’s approach to solving the problem and begins to design the associated test approach. The developer learns what will be tested, resulting in more solid production code from the beginning.
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Dawn Cannan, 42 Lines
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Better Software Conference West 2011: Lean Development Practices for Enterprise Agile An enterprise agile initiative requires a higher level strategic, portfolio, product, and team perspective. Lean software development integrates all of these perspectives into a cohesive, actionable whole. It does this through a combination of Lean-Science, Lean-Management, Lean-Team methods, and Lean-Learning. Alan Shalloway shows how these four aspects of lean form the basis for enterprise agility at all the levels. Lean-Science focuses on the laws present in all software development. Lean-Management creates the opportunity for management to contribute to the context within which teams work. Lean-Team methods are actualized in the Kanban approach. Lean-Learning enables all levels of the organization to learn how to improve their methods.
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Alan Shalloway, Net Objectives
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The Value of Defining "Done" Many agile teams fail to meet customer expectations by releasing products before they are complete. Eric Jimmink coaches teams to treat the Definition of Done (DoD) as a learned and required practice. The DoD must reflect both the team's ambitions and the customer's demands for a ready-to-release product. Defining “Done” gives direction to the team, manages customer expectations, and secures the value that is promised to the business. Setting measurable quality standards helps emphasize what the business really needs in a production product rather than the low price for which it can be built. Eric has found that early test execution is paramount in achieving the quality goals set in the DoD. He shares his practical experiences in creating a meaningful DoD and breaks the "waterfallacy" of exploring after checking.
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Eric Jimmink, Ordina
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Five Dysfunctions of Agile Teams Is your agile team not reaching their potential? They may be suffering from internal dysfunctions that contribute to less than optimal results. When core dysfunctions are left to fester, the end result may be a late or failed project-and the cause will be chalked up to “that's just the way agile sometimes is.” Based on his coaching work with hundreds of agile teams, Bob Hartman presents an agile team dysfunction model and identifies the five most common dysfunctions-Leave me in my silo, When we communicate it’s only by email, Others make commitments for us, Don't blame me because I didn't do it, and Worship the heroes. Bob shows how to determine dysfunctions, communicate them, and, most importantly, help teams get past them. Learn how teams can reach their full potential and even achieve greatness once they fully understand their weaknesses, and embrace practices and efforts necessary to overcome them.
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Bob Hartman, Agile For All
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Industrial Strength Exploratory Testing During the past few years, exploratory testing (ET) has gained popularity as one of the most efficient styles of testing for smaller agile development teams. It has a proven advantage of finding defects faster over larger areas of the software. However, exploratory testing is not a mainstay in large-scale, enterprise product testing. Anutthara Bharadwaj explores some of the myths surrounding ET-lack of planning, misconstruing exploration as ad-hoc testing, lack of metrics, deficiency of actionable data in defect reports, and more. Anu addresses these myths with real data from a case study of the Microsoft Visual Studio ALM team that adopted ET over a two-year product cycle on a team with more than one-hundred engineers with an enterprise product servicing several thousand customers.
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Anutthara Bharadwaj, Microsoft India (R&D) Pvt. Ltd
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Product Owner Anti-Patterns Do you want a successful product delivery-one that has cost-effective and prioritized product features, that has support from the organization, and acceptance from key stakeholders? If so, you need an effective and available product owner (PO) on your Scrum projects. While good POs work with the team to foster high productivity and quality, a bad PO can destroy the project. Bad POs manifest ineffective or counter-productive practices known as anti-patterns. Monica Yap reveals a set of common PO anti-patterns, discusses how to recognize them by their smells, explores the negative impacts they cause, and identifies ways to address them quickly. Monica shares these unfortunately all too common anti-patterns-The Absent Product Owner, Copy The Last One, The Churning Backlog, The Waffling Definition of "Done", No Single Product Owner, and Not Enough Stakeholders.
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Monica Yap, SolutionsIQ
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Test-driven Development: Achieving Testable Code Test-driven Development (TDD) has proven valuable on many development projects for more than ten years. Unfortunately, even today, many teams do not practice it. They give a myriad of excuses for not making TDD a part of their everyday practice. David Yancey reviews some of the more common excuses: "There's not enough time allotted in this project", "It's impossible with this code base", "I don't know where to start", "TDD only works on green field development projects", and he will demonstrate how to overcome these excuses in a team environment. David shares a proven method for becoming proficient with TDD within a project or system. Learn the steps of this method to re-factor your existing code base into testable code; add new, testable modules to existing code bases; and start new projects with TDD.
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David Yancey, Sogeti, Int
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