One of the basic but important customer expectations is – the software product should be of very good quality. That makes sense as well. However, what exactly “good quality” means?
Here are characteristics of good quality software:
Agile Testing is achieving quality in everything
We know “Testing As An Activity” is important, and why we should all test. The old axiom that “Testers Test and Programmers Code” is so outdated now and everyone needs to change. Testers are the testing experts in a team, and can help enable the whole team to own quality but they are certainly not the only one’s who should be testing. Like, developers need to contribute towards testing by unit testing their code and also pair testing to minimize defects and minimize test – defect-fix cycle.
Testing in agile, addresses the processes that produce software and also products of those processes. Hence I ask my teams to not just focus on validating software after development, but also check processes that produce software like, quality of stories, requirement/impact analysis, acceptance criteria(using behavior-driven-development to address “3 amigos problem), and more.
Take a look at our agile testing workshop which is a detailed 2 day course which focusses on test automation strategies, lean approach to defect prevention, various tools and techniques to automate, BDD(behavior-driven-development) and how to use various frameworks – Linear Scripting, Test Library Architecture, Data-Driven Testing, Keyword/Table-Driven and Hybrid automation frameworks.
Appraisals in an Agile Company – Part 2
In our last post, we discussed about how to break performance measures into team and individual measures to bring more team behavior orientations into appraisals.
Today, let’s talk about addressing other two issues: feedback frequency and how to make feedback effective.
Agile thinking is based on building frequent feedback loops within your teams and organization. Few examples of frequent feedback loops are:
- Sprint demos every couple of weeks, to get product feedback
- Sprint retros to get process and tool feedback
- TDD/BDD/continuos integration to get code feedback
- Continuous testing to get quality feedback. Check-out our new launched 2 day extensive workshop on agile way of testing
Printing Physical Scrum Board From Atlassian Jira
It’s well known fact that physical Scrum Boards provide many benefits over their electronic counterpart.
With physical boards current sprint state is transparently visible to anybody in the team and to the stakeholders. As a team member you no longer are required to explain someone what exactly the team is focusing on right now as anyone can look at physical board at any point of time. Also, during standup, story-card and sprint progress get more attention than individual progress. You can setup your physical board the way you want and you don’t have to work around the limitation of any electronic tool.
[Read more…] about Printing Physical Scrum Board From Atlassian Jira
Appraisals in an Agile Company – Part 1
Appraisals! How many of you dread this word? This is the only time in the year that you get to bargain for salary increments, everyone end-up negotiating to their best. Appraisals are closely connected with salary raise/increments, bonus payouts and it’s feedback intent takes the backseat.
There are three major issues with traditional approach to appraisal:
- Measuring and rewarding individual behaviors and contributions OVER team based measurements.
- Long appraisal cycle(mostly once a year) discussing both salary increments and feedback.
- Feedback process – Filling long appraisals forms with least discussions between reviewers about reviewee.