Agile Testing Days — Day #2: our turn to share with the community :)
This was the D-day to me and Viviane since we had our talk: CESAR.thon: a Testing Marathon Framework. We had the chance to share with the community the way we've been running testing marathons in CESAR since 2014, the goals archived so far and also some numbers and pictures. We also shared with the attendees some of the CESAR Testing Community's initiatives: meetups, training sessions, study groups and attending in events and conferences to learn from other people and companies, but also to be able to share the good work we are doing in CESAR.
After the session we had excellent chats with the attendees. Most of them were excited to have a CESAR.thon on their companies and also on their local testing communities.
Feel free to contact us if you need any support to run a testing marathon! \o/
My bug backlog is smaller than yours
The first talk I've attended was about the results and lessons learned that Kim Knup and her team got by experimenting with zero bug policy. Running this policy the team needs to have bug triage meetings periodically where they binary classify the bug: fix or close. Another great tip is "don't raise bugs — fix them". If they are quick wins, easy to solve, why not fix it immediately?
Kim also presented simple flow that her team is using to apply the zero bug policy (see the picture below). In their experience, they defined a role that is played by a member of the time and he/she is responsible to define if the bug will be fixed or not. They also do a rotation to have all the team members involved with this practice. When a decisions is made to not fix a bug, it's closed, set as won't fix e added a comment with the justification.
At the end of the experiment, the team knows exactly the size or their bug backlog - zero! -, their triage meetings got shorters due to the low number of bugs. They also perceived an improvement in the communication.
She also used very good pictures of bugs to illustrate her presentation. 🐞
I definitely need to run an experiment in our teams in CESAR. Let's do it.
I also attended to Marianne Duijst's talk. She used the moto of Harry Potter books and story to show that we need to understand the narrative details from all the characters points of view. In software development we need to do this as well when we have different perspectives like developers, testers, product owners, user, etc.
Right place and right time but wrong skills
Rob Lamber started his talk about 10 Behaviours of Effective Agile Teams saying that we need to have the proper skills. So that, we can act properly on the challenges and projects we are part of.
If you don't have the required skills you need to move forward by changing your behaviours. Consequently, you will be able to add value on your activities and support the team to archive project's purpose.
Rob highlighted 10 behaviours that allow us to be effective in our roles:
- Be Visibly Passionate: you need to be and show that you are passionate for what you do. Also, people gravitate around people that is positive about what they do
- Be open-minded: we need to go beyond our comfort zone, challenge us to learn in a secure environment
- Draw a frame around you, but do not be limited. You should understand what are your skills and what activities you execute in your rule, but in the same time understand the learning opportunities you have. "The opportunities are between roles".
- Become company smart. You need to understand the company's mission and its values. If you do not agree with them, you should move for other job
- Learn who your customers are: the teams need to know about their users and their problems.
- Improve the process: the teams need to have opportunities to learn and improve continuously
- Do what you say you will: teams when define a Definition of Done (DoD) need to deliver the value by doing what is according the definitions
- Communicate: need to have a good communication inside the teams and also with other stakeholders
- Add Skills: Skill + Skill + Skill = Value!
- Be brave! Don’t be afraid to question the status quo, but needs to be diplomatic
Testing is in everything
On the keynote A Practical Guide to Testing in DevOps, Katrina Clokie said that testers should influence the other roles to have quality in place on all the activities. Looking to DevOps usual activities, we find testing acting in all of them: we have automated tests running when I merge some code, when we build a version and also can have someone monitoring the environments and application's logs.
Another advice Katri shared with us were: add loggins, monitoring and alerting as part of our testing piramidy. They have to be part of our overall testing strategy.
The importance of real world experience in agile testing
This talk was facilitated by Duncan Ariey. He shared with us some of his thoughts about being a better tester when we really have experience with the world is around our products. For example, if you are an Android user in your daily bases, if you are testing an Android application the results tends to be more expressive due to the knowledge you already have in using this type of operational system and device. The real world experience will help allow you to design and run scenarios that probably will be executed by the real end users. Probably you are able to identify problems and poor use cases on the application when you are used to this king of software.
Breaking down silos to team cross functionality
On the last keynote of this day, Natalie Warnert talked about the way we need to improve our teams by breaking down the silos and understand that the value of our teams is the sum of our parts. This seens
We also need to eliminate the way we value the roles in a team. There are some roles that are treated as super hero. Everyone is important on the process and should be valuable in the same way.
To finish this awesome day, I had a chance to present Lisa Crispin with one of CESAR Testing Community's t-shirts! Thank you, Lisa for be always kind and supporter of our community \o/
