The Tester Who Came In From the Cold: Helping Testers Make an Agile Transition
, Lisa Crispin
Testers often get left out in the cold when their development team transition to agile. We’ll look at “the wall” of challenges they face, and explore the support testers need to break through it. The goal is to get testers and QA teams get traction understanding agile development. We’ll poll participants for problems, and explore what they need to know and where to find it. Training, physical logistics, new roles as agile testers and QA managers, adapting traditional testing activities such as audit requirements are just a few of the areas we’ll touch on. Through role-playing exercises, we’ll explore potential solutions to common problems.
When traditional software development organizations decide to “go agile”, testers, “QA teams” and test managers often get left out in the cold. Developers learn TDD, CI, refactoring, and how to pair. Project managers go to ScrumMaster certification. What do testers get? Too often, they’re left to fend for themselves, and the transition to agile looks as forbidding to them as the Berlin Wall. They’re looking for answers to questions like these:
• How does testing “keep up” with two-week iterations?
• I’m a QA manager, what is my role on the new agile team?
• Where does user acceptance testing fit now?
• What about those audit requirements?
• Am I supposed to go talk to the customers now? Or do they have to write tests themselves?
• Whom can I trust to help me cross to freedom?
This tutorial will tear down that wall, bring testers and their managers in from the cold, and help them integrate successfully with the agile development team to produce the best possible software.
Our audience includes QA/Test managers and testers who are struggling to integrate themselves and their teams into agile development projects; Project Managers and Customers who want to know how to interact with the test team in an agile project; Developers or development managers who have been “saddled” with a team of testers, who may or may not have expected technical skills.
We’ll use hands-on exercises, examples and lecture/discussion to help testers understand their role working on mainstream agile projects. Participants will learn how to transfer their existing skills to an agile environment, and how to collaborate with developers and other team members to succeed with testing and get all stories “done”. The session will be tailored as much as possible to the needs of the actual attendees by means of polling them at the start and adjusting the content and focus accordingly. Participants will also learn from each others’ experiences through discussions.
Content Outline and Approximate Timeline:
The tutorial includes group exercises and discussions, which are integrated into the content as appropriate.
Introduction – 10 minutes
• Identifying goals. Tutorial content will be tailored to the outcome of this.
Organizational Challenges – 15 minutes
• How to mix separate testing and development teams into combined, small agile teams
• Addressing conformance to audit requirements
• How are ‘traditional’ QA processes followed? – Ex. Defect tracking, tracking test results, sign-offs.
• Coordinating with related projects and systems
Agile Testing Transitions – 50 minutes
• How are the roles different than in a traditional test team?
• How can we test without a requirements document?
• Is the fast turnaround feasible?
• Is there a place for Test Plans?
• Who does integration testing, system testing, other types of testing?
• What about exploratory testing? Can customers help?
• How do agile teams handle User Acceptance Testing?
• How can a regression test cycle fit into an iteration?
• Is automation absolutely necessary?
• What do we do to help the customer team?
Successful Delivery – 15 minutes
• Achieving continual improvement
• How do we know if we delivered the minimum value?
• Resources for further information
Format:
The presentation will include problems that QA teams face and then offer specific techniques or solutions to try to overcome them. Exercises or demos will be used where needed to clarify techniques or concepts.
Background:
During a CWAC session we facilitated last year, we heard from a lot of different people about the problems their testers had, or the problems they had with their testers. “Our testers all quit”, “We keep inviting the testers to pair, but they refuse”. We learned that often, testers get no training or support. This tutorial hopes to address that.
Some material we will probably use in this tutorial is from our tutorial last year, which received excellent evaluations.