One of my favorite movies is the Fast and Furious series. Speed, adrenalin, no rules, just fun. Is there any parallel to software development? Today’s world is Agile and Agile means fast. However, fast should not be furious. What about Rally Dakar? One of the hardest racing event every year. If you want to succeed you have to respect and follow a lot of rules, strategies and you have to be brave and skilled. In my opinion, there are no best practices in Agile. However, there are plenty of ideas proved to be good to do in a given context. Definitions of Ready and Done are principles you should adopt regardless of the methodology you follow. A different point of view is always helpful and that is why I would like to explain these approaches on Rally Dakar and compare Agile Software Development with Racing to show you how ridiculous are some of our opinions, ideas, and compromises we are willing to do every day.
Journey to Effective Reporting - Make the Impact!
and most importantly – there is no impact. I would like to share with you how to avoid such wasting following “simple” steps applicable to any reporting to give you clues how to make a real impact.
"Working software over comprehensive documentation." - is written in Agile Manifesto and it is dogma we all believe in and I am not an exception.
However, the wording is "over" not "instead of". It means we value the left side more, but there is still value on the right one.
We all use some very good tools to manage our development like Jira, Rally, etc. These tools are perfect for requirement management, work planning + tracking, defect tracking and many other activities.
But I am often struggling using them freely when I found out they kill mine creative thinking and limits my results. I need something more in addition to stories, tasks, defects and all other entities.
I love mind maps for all of these. I would like to share with you why and how I am getting the most benefits from mind mapping approach. I will also share many templates you will be able to download.
After years doing Scrum, or to be precise, trying to do it - with many wins but also many failures, we are slowly moving to Kanban. Why and how? What does it mean for QAs? Let me share our story with you. I will share with you why the Scrum was our first choice. How we implemented it and what challenges we had. I will explain reasons why we switched to Kanban later and how we actually did. I will provide you with Guide for such transition and we will have a time for discussion. Talk will be focused on concept of “Quality as responsibility of whole team”.
… And everybody enjoys it!
Nice targets! But each target needs a measurement to see the progress.
Functional testing is only a small piece of QA on Agile projects so it is obvious that such approach is not sufficient. Do we even need to measure such things in Agile? Yes, we should. But there are other more important measures, metrics and areas to be focused on.
I would like to share with you the way that I am used to report on my projects from my role of QA Engineer Lead. My talk is simulation of one sprint to explain what you can use when and why.
Agile team is the group of different people, roles and individuals, but we all share the same goal = Deliver real value and enjoy it.
There was an idea that quality equals testing and only testers are responsible for it. Of course it is not true and Agile cleared out that testing itself is only measurement and it does not bring any quality itself. You cannot test Quality in; you need to build it in.
If Quality is understood as “Satisfaction of all stakeholders” than it needs to be responsibility of all of them. Each role and team member needs to contribute from its point of view and collaborate with others. Testing is still very important but it is only small piece of puzzle called Quality Assurance. So what are the other pieces?
I would like to share with you what is my vision of QA journey through the project life cycle, what the pieces are, how to bring them together, where to start, who is responsible for what and what achieve the point when whole team is responsible for Quality.