Terry Wiegmann

The next time you visit your local watering hole, give some thought to the bartenders and servers and the practices they use. From streamlining team processes to rewarding team performance to always keeping the customer in mind, there are some similarities in the principles used in the agile community and in the service industry.

When it comes to testing, there are so many areas that it's difficult to feel sure you covered everything. It can be helpful to use a mnemonic or other memory aid to remind you of your main points to hit. Terry Wiegmann recommends adding the acronym NEBS—for Normal, Error, Boundary, and Special test conditions—to your toolkit.

If you find it hard to do a thorough inspection of a document or diagram in a single pass, try looking at one aspect at a time. A concept that can help is using defined tours, an idea from exploratory testing. Inspecting for sets of criteria one by one can help you focus your efforts.

A craftsman could be defined by having enough experience to anticipate and prevent clients' problems before they even know they are going to have them. How might craftsmanship be manifested in analysis work? Terry Wiegmann captured some practices analysts can employ to demonstrate craftsmanship to their customers.

Terry Wiegmann noticed that in certain conversations with clients and team members, a single phrase can take her back to some “aha” moments when she grasped fundamental quality concepts. She shares some of these major learning moments throughout her career and how they can apply to quality engineering.

Terry Wiegmann writes about how Microsoft Word's features, like its spelling and grammar checkers, can help one identify agile smells—those signs that something might be wrong. While we may want to minimize documentation and the use of Word, we can mentally use some of Word’s features to sniff out some whiffs of smells.

In the agile world, there is a concept of “smells,” or symptoms that things aren’t going well. Introduced by Kent Beck and expanded on by practitioners, smells now describe problems involving adoption, coaching, design, code, and teams. When we see these symptoms, we can identify opportunities to improve.