Agile

Jean Tabaka provides straightforward guidance on how teams can begin their agile journey and learn to mature and scale into more and more discipline. The five-step approach emphasizes a path based on the principles of Lean Thinking-Flow, Pull, and Innovate. Each of the five steps outlines specific practices for growth as well as pitfalls and roadblocks to navigate and avoid. Step 1: The team learns to work in a continuous flow. Step 2: The team matures by pulling ready items from the backlog. Step 3: A group of teams adopts and scales up the individual team practices. Step 4: The scaling continues to cover multiple projects. Step 5: The practices are adopted throughout the entire organization. You can apply the disciplines discussed in this class to a single co-located team, a team of teams, or an entire organization eager to take advantage of both agile and lean approaches.

Strategic software development is happening every day-and failures continue to plague us. Unquestionably, a major paradigm shift is underway with the movement to agile methods. But are they really working? With results drawn from industry statistics, Michael Mah answers vital questions about the effectiveness of agile methodologies-XP, Scrum, TDD, pair programming, etc. One discovery underway is that agile methods could be turning the "law of software physics" upside down. For decades, there have been predictable relationships among schedule pressure, staff ramp-up, and bug rates; now, industry data tells us that all this could be changing with agile. Join Michael Mah for a revealing discussion of productivity findings at five-all ostensibly agile-companies, and how they produced a range of results for time-to-market, productivity, and quality.

If your background is testing on traditional projects, you are used to receiving something called "requirements" to develop test cases--and sometime later receiving an operational system to test. In an agile project, you are expected to continually test changing code based on requirements that are being uncovered in almost real time. Many perils and pitfalls await testers new to agile development. For example, as a tester new to agile, you might think, "I'll test the latest 'stories' on Tuesday when I get my next build." And you would be WRONG! Waiting for a new build will almost always put you at least one iteration behind the developers and in a schedule hole from which you cannot recover. To avoid this trap, you must start testing as soon as the developer has completed a feature story, even before coding begins.

On an agile team, everyone is a tester-anyone can and often does take on testing tasks. If that’s true, then what is special about being an agile tester? If I'm a tester on an agile team, what does that really mean? Do agile testers need different skill sets than testers on traditional teams? What guides agile testers in their daily activities? An agile tester embraces change, collaborates well with both technical and business people, and understands the concept of using tests to document requirements and help drive development. Agile testers have good technical skills, know how to collaborate with others to automate tests, and are experienced exploratory testers. How do they get that way? Skills are important, but mindset and attitude count even more.