development lifecycles

In FDA regulated industries, audits are high-stakes, fact-finding exercises required to verify compliance to regulations and an organization’s internal procedures. Although exploratory testing has emerged as a powerful test approach within regulated industries, an audit is the impact point where exploratory testing and regulatory worlds collide. Griffin Jones describes a heuristic model-Congruence, Honesty, Competence, Appropriate Process Model, Willingness, Control, and Evidence-his team used to survive an audit. You can use this model to prepare for an audit or to baseline your current practices for an improvement program. Griffin highlights the common misconceptions and traps to avoid with exploratory testing in your regulated industry. Avoid mutual misunderstandings that can trigger episodes of incongruous behavior and an unsuccessful audit.

Agile developers often face the difficult task of defining user stories from business rules for complex applications-medical, embedded, insurance, banking applications, etc. In his consulting practice, Rob Sabourin helps teams elicit and describe stories for thorny business rules, multi-path conditions, time/event triggered activities, awkward dynamics, special cases, unusual constraints, exceptions, and non-functional characteristics. Using the popular board game MONOPOLY as a metaphor, Rob shows you how to develop user stories that focus development in different business contexts. He models MONOPOLY stories around personas-the little token players move around the board. If you land on Boardwalk’s hotel after rolling a third double, you Go to Jail rent free. Rent is not owed unless requested and is exempt if the landlord procrastinates.

As a tester on an agile team, are you still creating lots of scripted test cases the old way? Are you still caught in the classic waterfall-always behind-while the rest of the team is doing Scrum and looking forward? Then, change course and work with your team to become a test specialist, coordinating testing rather than only doing testing. Henrik Andersson describes his experiences on a Scrum team and their transition to his test specialist role. To orchestrate such a change, they needed new tools and approaches. So, Henrik gives a short introduction to behavior-driven development. For developing automated unit tests, he describes how their team learned to write tests in English-like Gherkin notation. Then, he demonstrates Developers’ Exploratory Testing, in which the entire team tests together and shares joint responsibility for the quality of the software.

Unlike traditional requirements-formal specification documents produced mostly up front-agile requirements are elicited and recorded in smaller units-called stories or user stories that are generated quickly with a just-in-time approach. Through the INVEST approach-Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small, and Testable-Ken Pugh shows agile teams how to produce stories that offer the most value with the least effort. He explains the relationship between stories and traditional requirements models, such as use cases and state-event-response tables, and describes how to develop more details for stories only on an as-needed basis. Ken demonstrates ways to break large stories down into smaller, easier-to-estimate ones that address the needs of business analysts and developers.