Agile Testing:

Not Just Tester’s Story

LONG DANG

About me

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Agenda

Overview

Objectives

Problems

Agile testing- pieces of cake Management

Customer

Team

Tester

What we tried to grow

Closing

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Objectives

This topic focuses on

- The problems with current testing

mindsets/approaches

- How people think about Agile testing

- Personal views of Agile testing

- Our Agile testing activities: implement, review,

adapt

- Lesson learns

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Problems

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Problems in current testing

Traditional mindset and approach

Quality = Tester’s stories

Short iteration, release

White box vs Black box

Accountability

Agile testing – some views

Technical stuffs

More AUTOMATION

Working modelsC h a n g e s in team

Customer‘s benefits

Marketing make-up

HARD to IMPLEMENT

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Problems with Agile testing

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SESSION-BASED TESTING

PAIR

Programing

Testing

Estimation

Regression

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Agile testing – pieces of cake

Agile testing – personal view

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Firstly, let’s recall…

Agile testing – personal view

As it’s Agile so it’s about…

New MINDSET and Approaches

Continuous-improvement

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It is ALL

NOT just techniques, working models, team/individual, tools…

Beneficial

Agile testing – personal view

Let’s discuss on the pieces of cake

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Customer

Team Tester

Management

Agile testing – personal view

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Customer

Team

Tester

Management

Involvement

Feedbacks

Value focusSupport

Environment

Role/Title

Feature

team

Metric

Trust

Encourage

Strategies

Testing Ecosytem

Training/Coaching

Whole teamContinuous learning

Communication

PDCA

Willing to learn

Multi skills

Prevention vs Detection

Test soon, Test oftenExploratory

Big picture view

Agile Mindset

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What we tried to grow

The 1st story– Team Beaver

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Scrum team, 7 persons, 2 testers, sprint length 2 weeksJust manual testing, no automation Regression is getting big issue shortlyTeam members is swapped as new project coming

Context

First adaption: conduct regression iteration, all members do testing Next adaption:

Team/PO agrees to reduce 30% velocity to learn existing automation framework.Dev/Tester work closely and reduce processes to focus on prevention.SM to escalate to management to stop distracting team

Result: After one more release, 80% main functions automated

Action

collaborate transparently with customer to identify and resolve issueUse what can help, don’t stick strictly to a method.Team to speak upCross-functional mindset

Lesson

The 2nd story– Team Honey

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Scrum team, 9 persons, 2 testers, sprint length 2 weeks, 100% main function unit tested.

Want apply TDD and Pair ProgrammingTeam/PO is under pressure for critical release

Context

Firstly, team start learning/applying TDD kata and pairingFact: both of these techniques consumes too much efforts of team caused stopping those actions after 2 sprintsAdaption: No TDD at this time, TDD needs more time to be familiar with, just pair-programing for senior guys. Unit test is still reasonable to go. Action

No need to implement things if your team is not appropriate with, especially it doesn’t bring values to customer.Be patient and plan to learn new techniques carefully.Encourage and engage team members Lesson

The 3rd story– Team Rocks

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Also an Agile team with seniors, working on pilot project in 4 months, first time toapply multiple techniques in the testing quadrants, chance to show off to customer

TDD (Junit), BDD (Cucumber)Automation (Selenium-based framework)Exploratory testing (CDT)Performance (Jmeter/SoapUI) and security (not Pentest)Apply CI

Context

Fact: Project closed before deadline with big concern from customer about thehuge effort spending on testing

Adaption: No chance to correct

Action

Collaborate with customer to get their expectation and propose what values themGet them involved and provide feedbacks frequentlySpecify the expectation/benefit in DoDAgain, do PDCA Lesson

The 4th story– Nexgen

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An distributed Agile team, different time zone, old mindsetDon’t involve offshore testers in iteration activitiesTeam lead expect testing result based on the numbers of user storiesNot transparent info, request offshore tester many metricsChanges in user stories are disaster

Context

Fact: hard to get information to proceed and not sufficient to measureperformanceAdaption:

actively stay late to join their daily standup and any team activitiesPropose “testing velocity” based on the sum of Test Case point and Complexity pointSuggest customer to split out user stories to enough for iteration to testPropose customer to use user story mapping to share big view of release/product to the whole team

Action

Again, customer collaboration is importantDon’t expect customer to understand Agile well, especially testing, coaching them too.Propose useful and enough metrics to save time and value customers

Lesson

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Closing

Lesson learns

• After for years adopting Agile testing, we learnt that:

– Agile mindset is the most important thing

– The whole team approach

– Use any model/quadrant/ecosystem that fits your team’s capacity

– Collaborate closely with all stakeholders, get them involved and provide feedbacks frequently

– Continuously review and improve team’s capacity as well as processes/methods

– Encourage team to adopt new techniques, slow and solid as long as they value customer

– Celebrate team success by focusing on value/motivated metrics

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References

• Let’s Break The Agile Testing Quadrants (Gojko Adzic 2013)

• A tester’s view on James Bach’s presentation ‘The REAL Agile Testing Quadrants’ http://assurity.co.nz/community/big-thoughts/a-testers-view-on-james-bachs-presentation-the-real-agile-testing-quadrants/

• Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams – Lisa Crispin, Addison-Wesley Professional; 1 edition (January 9, 2009)

• Software Testing (2nd Edition) - Ron Patton, Sams Publishing (August 5, 2005)

• Explore It!: Reduce Risk and Increase Confidence with Exploratory Testing - Elisabeth Hendrickson, Pragmatic Bookshelf; 1st edition (March 3, 2013)

• Testing in Scrum: A Guide for Software Quality Assurance in the Agile World (Rocky Nook Computing) 1st Edition – Tilo Linz, Rocky Nook; 1 edition (April 7, 2014)

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Q&A

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