Helping software testers remain relevant and employable – find out more below
I get lots of enquiries from founders of start-ups who reach a certain growth point where they really need to start taking control of the quality of the work being produced. Their companies seem to reach a size and market growth where the focus on quality becomes a priority. This is usually about the time
I loved my time as a scrum master. It was an interesting and rewarding role. But being a scrum master mostly sucks. Here are 10 Reasons Why Being A Scrum Master Sucks*
After meeting Shmuel Gershon, probably the most energetic and enthusiastic tester on the Planet, at EuroSTAR 2010, I was introduced to a man of many talents. Not only does he like to read, write and talk about testing but he’s also adding back to the community in other ways with probably the most useful tool
Last year I attended an excellent agile testing conference but came away frustrated at one of the keynote presentations. One segment of the talk mentioned the often painful transition to agile. The presenter made reference to a British TV show character who is quite nice, but quite dim. In other words, an amiable kind of
I’ve been noticing posts, comments and tweets about agile recently where people are being incredibly derogatory and negative. Almost to the point where their comments are bordering on offensive. The trouble is most of these people openly admit they have never actually worked in an agile environment. So what gives? You know what I
Continuing my exploration of the life of a story in agile testing. Part 1 is here. Each story on the backlog has been defined by the business and the customer. These are capabilities that the customer wants. So the next step is to distill some more information in them in the form of acceptance
Over the next few posts I’ll be exploring the concept of a story in an agile environment and what it means to us as a tester. Over the past few days I’ve been hearing about how testers don’t get involved with story writing sessions, how testers duplicate the acceptance criteria in their tests and how
Our programmers here at iMeta now wax lyrical about pair programming and it’s easy to see why. The quality of code coming through to the test team now is exceptional. There’s very few fix-fail episodes and the programmers seem over the moon with how great pair programming is fairing. Sure, there were teething issues and
A low tech dashboard is a great way of communicating the state of the software mid sprint. At the end of the sprint, the board is fairly meaningless unless you have stories incomplete. But mid-sprint it’s a great visual way of showing progress. I.e. we’ve hit this feature in depth and it looks ok.
With some careful planning, a good use of time and access to your customer (or customers proxy) you can craft and distill stories that will make your job as a tester all the more effective. On an agile project test involvement early in the planning and story writing can add an extra dynamic. Testers
One of the main things I really like about agile is the fact that the whole team are creating and working towards shippable software at the end of each sprint. Well, that’s the theory anyway. And a positive side effect of this is that you lose the ‘over the wall’ mentality. In a true
For me one of the most difficult challenges I have faced as a tester is the move from a traditional project methodology to an agile one. The process of adopting agile for a manual tester is tricky. It’s incredibly difficult and often it is the testers who offers the most resistance when teams make
