Articles
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Building the Right Culture Within Your SQA Team The concept for development teams in a scrum environment is to be self-organizing, basically managing themselves and holding each other accountable. This poses the question: What do QA managers do with their time? For me, it’s always been about building the right culture—respecting those under you just as much as you respect those above you. It is about finding a way to manage your team without being directly involved with them. |
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5 Ways Testers Can Mitigate Practical Risks in an Agile Team Testers who analyze quality in every aspect of the team’s deliverables also have a responsibility to mitigate risks and practical issues that are bound to come up, and help the team succeed in their product as well as at being agile. Here are five such issues that testers can help the team alleviate or avoid. |
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How Depersonalizing Work and Managing Flow Can Humanize the Workplace Using metrics such as cumulative flow to monitor throughput and quantitative thinking may not seem very humanistic, but by depersonalizing the work being done, we can focus our energies on solving actual problems instead of conducting a daily witch-hunt and shaming people into high performance. |
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Writing in an Agile World Sarah Johnson explains the role of writing in an agile world and how to educate your team members. Remember, agile takes into account that each situation is unique, and you need to determine what makes the most sense for your particular Scrum team. |
Better Software Magazine Articles
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Scrum: Back to Basics So you think you know Scrum? Using the whimsical notion of farm animals and light-hearted visuals, take a refreshing review of the entire Scrum lifecycle as an intuitive set of roles, responsibilities, and handoffs. Particular attention is placed on what the ScrumMaster and product owner are expected to do at each handoff. |
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Reshaping Our View of Agile Transformation Transforming a software development team to agile may not go as planned. The real change requires a phased approach to earn agile acceptance. That mindset must extend beyond the team to the entire organization. |
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Alternate Testing Models: A Tale of Veggies and Precious Gems As if working at Lego isn’t fun enough, Sherri Sobanski delights in finding new ways to test. Faced with a situation requiring a complete product redesign, she shares the route her team took to overhaul testing. |
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The Mindset of the Agile Developer Most software development teams these days adopt an agile approach to guide projects through their lifecycle. But, according to Gil Broza, embracing popular practices is not enough. To work effectively in an agile environment, developers must change their mindset. |
Interviews
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DevOps Misconceptions and Testing Confidence: An Interview with Hans Buwalda
Video
In this interview, Hans Buwalda, the CTO at LogiGear, details the common misconceptions people have when it comes to DevOps. He also discusses continuous integration and continuous deployment, having the right amount of confidence when it comes to testing, and how to know if DevOps is right for you. |
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Shifting Left and Going beyond Agile: An Interview with Michael Nauman In this interview, Michael Nauman, a testing lead for AutoCAD Web, explains how we can go beyond basic agile principles. He digs into the current state of shift-left testing, the importance of aligning your DevOps with your automation, and using agile as a starting point on your quality journey. |
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Scaling Agile: A Guide for the Perplexed: An Interview with Sanjiv Augustine
Podcast
In this interview, Sanjiv Augustine, the president of LitheSpeed, sheds light on a handful of scaling frameworks, including the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS), and the simple scrum of scrums meeting. |
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The Fundamentals of Agile: An Interview with Jeff Payne
Podcast
In this interview, Coveros CEO and agile instructor Jeff Payne discusses why you should make the move to agile, its many benefits, and how to transition. He also explains his SQE Training course, Fundamentals of Agile Certification. |
Conference Presentations
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Using Lean XP to Supercharge Your Agile Delivery
Slideshow
Most teams that do agile development start with Scrum. And why not? Scrum is a proven method for focusing your team, ensuring that work adds value, and minimizing the risk with release. Then, after awhile, Scrum becomes stagnant. |
Jim Collins
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What “Good” Looks Like: The 4 Quadrants of Product Ownership
Slideshow
The product owner role was introduced in Scrum in 1993, so the role has been around for more than twenty-five years. Yet we still struggle with the nature of it. Is it simple or complex? Is it inward- or outward-facing? It is about backlogs and stories, or something more? |
Bob Galen
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DevOps for the Agile Practitioner
Slideshow
As an agile coach, ScrumMaster, or product owner, you interact with technical teams every day, even though you may not have a technical background yourself. |
Lee Eason
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The Essential Product Owner: Partnering with Your Teams
Slideshow
While the Scrum product owner is arguably the most crucial role within agile teams, we often hear horror stories about POs who aren’t available to their teams, change their minds incessantly on business priorities, or ignore quality requirements and technical debt. |
Bob Galen
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