program selection system

Automated unit testing is the agile software development equivalent of “in-process inspection” in Lean Production systems. xUnit is the generic name given to the family of tools/frameworks used by developers when developing automated unit tests. The community has now had enough experience with using XUnit to start cataloging “best practices” and “not so best practices” as patterns and smells. This tutorial introduces a number of these “test smells”, describes their root causes, and suggests possible solutions expressed in the form of patterns.

Why does Agile adoption fail? Why do projects doing “textbook” Agile sometimes fail. There is of course no one right answer to these questions. But we suggest the answer can often be gleaned by considering the small things. It’s quite common for projects to follow a “textbook” Agile methodology in the large, while undermining basic Agile principles in the small. We don’t suggest that allowing small problems to flourish is willful neglect. Rather, small, easily ignored nuisances or compromises in the quality of the process and product can become debilitating in size and number.

To support an agile methodology effectively on an enterprise scale, a lightweight release framework is highly useful in empowering small self-organizing teams while “optimizing the whole” of the product you are focused on delivering. Interestingly enough, we found that the absence of one can actually inhibit agility and avoidable ambiguity, in an environment where there is a high degree of unavoidable ambiguity. Find out how we created a lightweight release framework and enabled even greater agility in the organization!

Despite the advances in both developer and customer automated testing, there remains a great deal of anecdotal evidence and testing thought leadership that suggests degrees of manual testing is still required for software-intensive projects, especially at the traditional, higher test levels such as user acceptance testing. We have come to believe that this doesn’t mean agile techniques do not stay in the picture for the duration of manual testing.

This experience report outlines technical lessons learned over a several year period across several projects within an organisation which aggressively applied most of the agile practices with much success. The success, however, was not been achieved without challenges and lessons learned along the way. This paper outlines the interesting observations we made while trying to turn the agile dials to eleven. Our starting assumption when we began this journey several years ago was that productivity and quality were opposing forces; you had to trade one off against the other. However, after turning the dials to eleven, we now believe that you can much more of both than we previously thought possible. In fact, we believe that applying the practices outlined in this experience report allow both much higher quality and higher productivity than traditional development.

In the Web 2.0 age, end-to-end web testing provides tremendous feedback on the quality of your Web application. However this feedback cycle is typically quite long and comes at a high maintenance price. This talk shares our field experience in establishing web acceptance test suites with high return on investment (ROI) for Web applications.

As the Software as a Service (SaaS) model becomes a more widely accepted method of software delivery, traditional software lifecycle methodologies have struggled to keep up. What does it take to do frequent, seamless rollouts of software on a massive scale with minimal capital and staff while also achieving the maximum number of ‘9s’ of service availability? How can the SaaS model become a real competitive advantage that, when combined with Agile and Lean methods, creates better products and more efficient and collaborative organizations?

This experience report will talk to Automated Functional Testing on the TransCanada Pipelines Alberta Gas Accounting program of projects. We feel that the story around Functional Testing is a compelling one to an audience of agile practitioners: 621 FIT Functional Tests scripts produced in the last module (over 23 months), Business is sold on the benefits of the approach to Automated Functional Testing; All future projects include automated functional testing; Business Analysts (not Developers, not Quality Assurance) write the FIT test scripts.

Other highlights:

It is challenging to successfully integrate QA within the agile process. Not only is expanding the XP process to include other disciplines difficult but XP teams typically reject traditional QA practices. Integrating QA into your XP team does not have to be painful. It can be achieved by building an agile QA process through tackling small goals using the XP principles.

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.