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Agile

Testing in Agile: A Few Key Points to Consider

June 28, 2023 by Lauren Payne

Thanks to CTG for providing us with this blog post.

What is Agile Testing?

This may come as a surprise, but there really is no such thing as “Agile Testing.” Let’s break this down into two terms: Agile and Testing.

Agile is a development approach that has been widely adopted since the early 2000s, whereas Testing is a process that determines the quality of a software product. The basic principle in software testing is that testing is always context dependent. In other words, you must adapt your process, activities, and objectives in order to align them with your business context.

How Does Testing in Agile Differ From Traditional Approaches?

The main difference between an Agile approach and a more traditional approach with respect to testing lies in the ever-changing, fast-paced, and continuous character of testing.

With Agile, the objective is to deliver value as fast as possible to the stakeholders. Since an Agile approach embraces change, the concept of value itself can change between sprints or iterations.

When traditional approaches are applied, there is always a period between the analysis and test execution phases where developers are performing their magic. During this period, testers review, evaluate and analyze the documentation at hand, trying to prevent any defects from entering the code as well as preparing their test case design.

In an iterative or incremental approach, such as Agile, such a period does not exist. Every member of the Agile team is considered multi-disciplinary and must therefore be able to perform any tasks within the team. It simply does not matter whether it’s analysis, development, or testing. Given the lack of time to prepare test cases upfront, testing becomes less scripted and more explorative.

Finally, due to the circular motion, a lot of the testing work is redundant. In a traditional approach, the code is stable and frozen when testing starts. As a result, a test that passed 4 weeks ago should still pass.

In an Agile approach, requirements, user stories, product backlog items (PBI), may undergo significant changes in between iterations, based on customer feedback. To ensure that new functionalities do not break the existing solution, rigorous regression testing is required within every iteration, lowering the bandwidth for testing new functionalities.

What Skills do Testers Need & What Roles do they Play in Agile Projects?

Whether its an Agile approach or a traditional approach, the skills that testers need are largely identical. We can organize these testing skills into 4 categories:

  • Business or domain knowledge: Understanding the context of the work or project
  • IT knowledge: General understanding of all the other roles and activities
  • Testing knowledge: How to deduct test cases and how to execute them.
  • Soft skills: How to deduct analytical skills, communication skills, empathy, and a critical mindset.

In fact, testers should feel more at home in an Agile team, as they are more in control. Testers can pull work from the backlog when they are ready as opposed to a traditional approach, where work is pushed to them whether they are ready or not.

What is the Best Way To Assess Quality Risks?

When it comes to Agile, collaboration and communication are key. Every requirement contains a risk to the product. By writing and reviewing the requirements together (i.e. collaborative user story writing) with developers, analysts and testers, all stakeholders are made aware of possible risks.

It is important to note that not all risks carry the same weight and mitigating them can occur through different means. Lower-level risks associated with a specific product backlog item (PBI) can be addressed in its acceptance criteria. Product risks on a higher level than a single user story can be mitigated in quality gates such as the definition of ready (DOR) and the definition of done (DOD).

The same principle applies for estimation of time. However, Agile team members do not estimate the time required to perform a certain task. Due to the risk of anchoring, it is better to assess tasks on a PBI level using story points. These fictive, relative, values express the total effort required by the entire team to complete the task. It’s not the sum of analysis, development, and testing in the most favorable circumstances, but rather the team’s evaluation of how much effort the task would require for any given team member to complete.

3 Ways to Enhance your Understanding in Agile Projects

Like anything in life, improving your understanding in Agile projects requires deliberate actions. Here are 3 ways you can enhance your knowledge:

  • Join an Agile team

Practices makes perfect. Joining an Agile team is a great way to gain valuable exposure and experience to Agile principles in order improve one’s understanding and proficiency.

  • Follow Agile trainings

Regardless of your field or profession, learning should never stop. Participating in Agile trainings can allow you to learn more about Agile, which you can then apply in the real world.

  • Read great Agile resources

Finally, it is never a bad idea to pick up any of the great literature about Agile. Perhaps less interactive than the first two suggestions, reading about Agile makes it possible to learn from some of leading Agile specialists.

Interested in expanding your agile skills, experience, or know-how? CTG Academy offers both in-person and online training dedicated to help those working in agile. Discover our agile trainings and take your projects to the next level.

Want to know more on agile? Discover our agile service or contact us!

Author

EuroSTAR 2023 Michaël Pilaeten

Michael Pilaeten , Learning and Development Manager

Breaking the system, helping to rebuild it, and providing advice and guidance on how to avoid problems. That’s me in a nutshell. With 17 years of experience in test consultancy in a variety of environments, I have seen the best (and worst) in software development. In my current role as Learning & Development Manager, I’m responsible for guiding our consultants, partners, and customers on their personal and professional path towards excellence. I’m chair of the ISTQB Agile workgroup and international keynote speaker (United Kingdom, France, Spain, Peru, Russia, Latvia, Denmark, Armenia, Romania, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg).

CTG is an EXPO exhibitor at EuroSTAR 2023, join us in Antwerp

Filed Under: Agile Tagged With: 2023, EuroSTAR Conference

World Quality Report 2022-2023: Orchestrating Quality in Agile Organizations

May 10, 2023 by Lauren Payne

Thanks to Sogeti for providing us with this blog post.

With the ongoing evolution of Agile and DevOps addressing the need to release more and release faster, quality assurance plays a vital role at every stage of the release cycle.

In the 14th Edition of the World Quality Report, we see quality in the agile and DevOps environment viewed like an orchestra. Every element of the software development process comes together in harmony to complete the finished piece, like a perfect musical performance where quality is assured.

This is referred to as quality orchestration whereby the teams, skillsets, provisioning, automation practices, service virtualization, and more are viewed – and managed – as a seamless end-to-end whole. Collaboration in this orchestrated agile environment is key. It’s how test and quality engineers ensure their activities deliver the two most important quality objectives for the agile enterprise – excellent customer experience and business outcomes.

Our latest World Quality Report survey found that agile and DevOps were delivering benefit in line with these two objectives at many levels. For example, when asked if they had seen ‘significant’ improvements (i.e., more than 20%) since adopting agile and DevOps, 64% of the survey respondents said they had seen improvement in the area of on-time delivery, 63% in predictability, 62% in reducing the cost of their quality activities, and 61% in customer experience.

Agile Adoption Continues to Grow

This chapter of the WQR also assesses the evolution of agile and DevOps and the tools/approaches used to assure quality. For example, we discover that although the agile implementation of packaged enterprise systems has been slow to take off, with waterfall being the predominant methodology for many years, agile adoption has started to grow. Indeed, 59% of the survey respondents now have a well-implemented agile methodology for quality and testing. Quality is being further assured by a number of different approaches, such as pre-built test case repositories for certifying sprints, which has been adopted by 63% of the survey respondents.

When it comes to enterprise systems, testing isn’t always carried out by quality engineers. Some 62% of surveyed organizations say it is carried out by business SMEs. Nonetheless the skills of quality engineers remain integral to agile teams with 32% of organizations saying quality engineers make up between 26% to 35% of their agile teams, and 28% of organizations saying their agile teams comprise even more quality engineers at between 36% to 45% of the team make-up.

Recommendations for Success

As quality orchestration increases within the software development lifecycle (SDLC), the WQR looks ahead to possible future developments, such as a need for much higher levels of automation and quality as the pace of continuous quality grows. It also makes several recommendations for ensuring agile and DevOps success across the SDLC, such as making quality engineers integral to agile development programs, and blending both technical and business skills within the broader quality engineering skillset.

Get in Touch

If you’d like to hear more about our findings relating to quality orchestration in agile and DevOps, please get in touch with:

Author

Bart Vanparys

Practice Lead, Quality Engineering & Testing, Sogeti

Bart has carried many titles in his 20 year career. He’s been an analyst, tester, quality assurance consultant, test manager, project manager, BI developer, quality manager, change manager, CoE lead, program quality lead.

A constant has been his search for ways to deliver value through IT solutions in a controlled and safe manner. He has gained experience in many domains including testing, quality management, service management, project management and architecture. He believes that a broad background combined with deep specialized expertise in selected domain is essential to be valuable in our industry.

Bart’s specialty is testing and quality engineering. His broad interest is in everything else. Bart graduated as Commercial Engineer (KU Leuven, Belgium) and has worked in IT consultancy since 2000. In 2011, he joined Capgemini Belgium where he took a lead role in building the Sogeti Testing & Quality Management practice. He has performed assignments in public sector (European Commission), finance and retail. He is currently supporting organizations in building testing & quality engineering capabilities.

Sogeti is an EXPO Gold partner at EuroSTAR 2023, join us in Antwerp

Filed Under: Agile, DevOps Tagged With: 2023, EuroSTAR Conference

How 2023 IT Trends Impact Software Testing

March 17, 2023 by Lauren Payne

Thanks to OpenText / MicroFocus for providing us with this blog post.

[Disclaimer: The future described in this article is the author’s personal view and is by no means any indication of OpenText products’ direction.]

Happy 2023 to the community! The beginning of a year is always the time to think big and look into the future. Last year, I wrote about three 2022 trends that’ll change test management, all of which continue to gain momentum. So far, you’ve heard 2023 predictions from analyst firms, consulting firms, and others. Among those trending IT keywords, I picked a few important ones to share with you. These words may not be new. But they have become even more important in today’s challenging business environment. Putting them together, we can see new ways of developing, testing, and measuring software.

Industry Cloud Booms

Gartner defines industry cloud platforms as modular, composable platforms supported by a catalogue of industry-specific packaged business capabilities. Packaged business suites are not new. The ERP suites from SAP, Oracle, and other vendors are well-known examples. Industry cloud platforms offer a rich set of industry-specific capabilities from many vendors and a place to compose and deliver business applications faster. Enterprise integration PaaS gives you the tools to easily integrate those industry components to form your application with low code or no code.

Cloud is the marketplace of other good stuff too, including AI and data analytics capabilities. Container technologies let you deploy your applications easier and swap out a defective module quickly.

Leveraging the industry cloud shortens the cycle to deliver value and lets you focus on innovation instead of the underlying mundane tasks. Some industry cloud platforms are already full-fledged, including the SAP Industry Cloud and Microsoft Cloud for industries. Companies with deep industry knowledge, like Deloitte, also join the play with their industry solutions.

When your application is built in this way, a focus of testing is verifying the business processes—the “wiring” you composed—and the testers are likely business users. Tools to efficiently verify business processes will find many new places to shine. Testers of all skill levels will appreciate the ability to manage complex interdependencies and save efforts with a component- or model-based approach. Model-based testing directly generates test cases from your business process model and automates them. Expect it to become more common in 2023.

With cloud platforms for building applications fast, you won’t want to lose momentum in the testing part. That’s why cloud-based testing and device farm are your choice.


Observability-Driven Development

The concept of observability has been around for decades. But it recently got popular in the cloud world because it allows people to observe the health of cloud-based systems by analyzing logs and correlating events. Now observability has come to software too, with observability-driven development (ODD). By adding a small amount of code for instrumentation, the development team can observe what’s happening when the application runs in the production environment in the cloud. When there is any issue with the app, observability helps identify the cause quickly and accurately—pinpointing the specific code in question.

ODD is yet another way to strengthen the feedback loop from Ops to Dev. ODD is also said to be a way to test in production, i.e., shift-right testing. The biggest advantage of testing in production is that you have real data and the same environment as customers use. Such observability is also valuable when you test in staging environments. We’ll see more test management or DevOps governance tools incorporate observability data into their data repository for analytics and insights in 2023.

FinOps Meets Value Stream Management

The word FinOps combines “Finance” and “DevOps,” stressing collaboration between business and engineering teams.

FinOps started when cloud service providers and other vendors wanted to provide a way of managing finances for a company’s cloud-based systems. It’s meant to help organizations find the best spending model for achieving their business goals. OpenText HCMX supports FinOps.

I expect to see FinOps and value stream management (VSM) converge sometime in the future. Both are extensions of DevOps. FinOps focuses on managing your costs against business value, while VSM focuses on eliminating bottlenecks and wastes during the process of delivering business value. With both sets of data, you can optimize the cost performance of your application. For example, when you’re unsure whether it’s more efficient to outsource a certain part—such as testing—FinOps and VSM data will likely give you a clear answer.

What’s Next?

You may have noticed that all of the above are related to the cloud. Why? Challenges in the global economy are driving more cloud adoption. The cloud has become the frontier of innovation. Every enterprise that wants to win and lead must embrace the cloud. OpenText software quality solutions went the SaaS model to serve customers who are moving to the cloud in two ways—reducing tooling cost and increasing speed.

Stay tuned on what’s happening with OpenText cloud solutions, especially the ValueEdge platform, in which you will find the most innovative software quality capabilities from OpenText at the earliest.


What is your organization’s cloud initiative? We are here to help. Contact us to discuss details.

Author

Ying Lei

Ying Lei is a senior product marketing manager at OpenText who specializes in test management, application lifecycle management, DevOps and value stream management.

OpenText is an EXPO Gold partner at EuroSTAR 2023, join us in Antwerp

Filed Under: Agile, DevOps, Software Testing Tagged With: 2023 trends, agile, ALM, Cloud Testing, DevOps, SaaS, software testing, Test Management, Value Stream Management

Exploratory testing in agile

March 7, 2023 by Lauren Payne

Thanks to Xray for providing us with this blog post.

The purpose of exploratory testing is to learn how a particular area of your testing is working while using your skills as a tester to offer insightful input to your team. Through exploratory testing, you can ensure that all bugs are detected, and developers can fix them in time for the product release.

Exploratory testing is important and should be a component of your testing strategy since it helps you evaluate your tests’ efficacy, identifies code inconsistencies, and removes bottlenecks where defects are most likely to lurk.

In this post, our solution architect Sérgio Freire gives you the best tips on how to do exploratory testing in an agile environment.

Working in an Agile context

At the start of a product or one of its releases, we assume that we know everything there is to know about the product. However, there are often many unknowns and assumptions.

Agile comes as a way to deal with the complexity and unknowns around the whole software development and delivery process. When working in an Agile context, the software is delivered in small batches, known as iterations.

The idea is to reduce the batch of work and learn with small experiments. So, instead of working for a long time on a complex feature, we iterate on it by collecting feedback, learning, and incorporating our findings.

All this means that many changes are due to these iterations driven by our findings and feedback.

Exploratory Testing and Agile

The following model called the “Learning Lollipop model” (created by Sergio Freire), tries to highlight what happens during exploratory testing.

It’s a way to frame exploratory testing where we “taste” our product/product ideas (like tasting a lollipop), starting with questions that will give us ideas for designing testing experiments that we execute and then analyze. From this process, we learn. In turn, that will raise additional questions that will trigger new ideas for test experiments. While we do so, we walk in the unknown lake that contains all possible usages of our product. The more we explore, the more we find.

Using an example, let’s first try to see how these actually work well together. Say we are working in a system with a set of features, aiming to add a new feature using an Agile approach.

From a testing perspective, what we had (i.e., how the system behaved) should be covered by a set of checks, using test automation scripts as much as possible. This will allow us to collect almost immediate feedback from the CI pipeline(s).

We cannot simply retest everything from the past “by hand.” We also know that test automation scripts are fallible because they will always be limited to testing what they’re hardcoded to check; however, they give us a good starting point.

Whenever iterating on a new feature, we know that we don’t know much about it beforehand; that’s why we’re iterating it, after all. Usually, we’re dealing with a rough user story and not an extensive, highly detailed requirement.

Therefore, we need to test our initial ideas for the user story and depict areas/risks we should have in mind. Many questions will come, at the start, during, and after the implementation. All these can become ideas for test charters that we can explore with Exploratory Testing sessions.

Remember that in an Agile context, changes are frequent, and risks also change very dynamically.

Exploratory Testing is a great fit in Agile, as it is extremely flexible and doesn’t require upfront preparation (as happens with manual scripted test cases). It also uses information from previous sessions to drive new testing sessions. Therefore, it adapts to changes as it doesn’t assume a certain state and expected results for the system.

Tips for exploratory testing

Exploratory testing mockups.

Perform exploratory testing sessions on early mockups, internally and with users. This can be quite helpful to optimize flow problems, for example, and highlight the most valuable ones. You can also apply exploratory testing during your design sprints.

Discuss upfront with the team possible charters for your exploratory testing session.

During regular meetings (e.g., standups, planning), discuss with the team the test charters (i.e., the questions you aim to answer during testing). It’s a good moment to talk about risks and have insights from different team members, giving ideas for further exploration.

It’s always a good time to perform an exploratory testing session.

Whether you’re adopting waterfall or Agile, it’s always a good moment to perform some exploratory testing. We will never know everything about our product/system and its context, but we can further improve our understanding by conducting exploratory testing sessions. There are many quality attributes we can look at, for example. Consider aspects that concern your team, users, and business, and use that to drive new sessions. Taking some time to explore is investing in knowledge so that we can then work towards incorporating that feedback and improving our product/system.

Use exploratory testing to highlight ideas for test automation scripts.

Features should come with code, including unit and integration level tests and even system tests if appropriate. Whenever performing exploratory testing, one of the outputs can be ideas for test automation scripts. During exploratory testing, we may find flows, impacts, and edge cases, for example, that, due to their relevance, should be covered by “automated tests.”

This applies to the waterfall and Agile projects and will allow us to improve test coverage addressed by test automation and hopefully gain more time to focus on other tasks (e.g., further exploration, fixing problems, etc.).

Perform exploratory testing on the feature branches or the PRs.

If your team uses feature branches while features are being implemented, you can and should test. This means working with developers to improve the feature iteratively. You may perform an exploratory testing session around a certain risk, quality attribute, or subset of that feature at a given moment. You can also perform a session when the PR is ready for review; if you tested while it was implemented, then this moment will eventually be more of a high-level type of charter.

Perform exploratory testing after merging branches.

Merges sometimes produce unexpected results. Even though the feature branch may (should) include automated tests, there can be unexpected consequences, so scheduling an exploratory testing session can help uncover them.

Involve developers and other roles in exploratory testing.

Besides testers, getting others on board for exploratory testing can provide additional perspective. At the same time, foster a quality centric culture where team members can improve quality from the start in the future.

Pairing with a developer, with the PO, with a designer is a good practice to understand not just the system from different angles but also what different stakeholders expect from it; besides, it’s an excellent mid/long-term investment towards better quality.

Don’t limit exploratory testing to non-regression.

Even whenever automated regression tests may cover existing features, it’s a good practice to perform exploratory testing also for regression testing if you have the opportunity to. Test automation can cover the essentials, but we know many things escape these tests as they will always be limited in number and scope. Looking back at your previous features with your eyes wide open may depict problems added meanwhile and problems that you didn’t have the opportunity to uncover.

Exploratory test your test automation.

Look at your existing test automation and explore it to look for problems (it’s also code, isn’t it?). Look also for problems in scope, concurrency, and relevance. Look at your existing test automation logs, as they may provide valuable information or expose too much or too little information.

Exploratory test using tools to augment testing and gain efficiency.

Tools are used to perform certain tasks with efficiency and consistency. In exploratory testing, tools are used to augment the tester’s capabilities, not to replace the tester. An exploratory tester will easily use tools to facilitate API requests and assist with performance testing. With tools, an exploratory tester can be more efficient and cover quality aspects that otherwise would be hard or even impossible to tackle.

Exploratory test looking for gaps and opportunities to improve the value.

While testing, we look for problems that affect the quality and, therefore, the value as seen by different stakeholders. Testing is about understanding how the system works connected with expectations from all these different stakeholders. In this sense, testing is also about finding opportunities to increase the value. During exploratory testing, and using our knowledge and background, we can depict ways of improving the value of our products. Maybe that can be about framing the feature slightly differently, trying out a new form or interaction.

Bringing some agility with Exploratory Testing to waterfall projects

For organizations working on waterfall-based projects, testing mostly occurs after features have already been implemented. We know that if this happens, then the cost of fixing problems increases considerably.

Usually, there are initial requirements that drive implementation. These highly detailed specifications are not immune to problems; on the contrary: they can be built on top of many assumptions and lack actual user feedback.

We know that requirements, and specifications, in general, are incomplete, ambiguous, sometimes contradictory, and easily get outdated.

As exploratory testers, we can use not only requirements and other documents as the source for our tests; we also understand the context of our product, know about similar products, and know of known heuristics that can help us expose problems through test tracking and reporting. We also have our background that we can use to expose risks and impacts that otherwise could escape traditional testing.

In waterfall projects, we can use Exploratory Testing to help us:

  • Uncover problems, risks, and gaps that we couldn’t predict beforehand as they were not identified in the requirements/specifications.
  • Introduce testing while the feature is being implemented and thus refine it before it’s too late.
  • Complement traditional approaches, such as manual scripted test cases, with exploratory testing to go beyond the obvious and expose problems that we could otherwise miss.

Unleash your testing potential with Exploratory Testing

Exploratory testing promotes innovation instead of scripted testing that is centered around specified test cases and attempting to complete a fixed number of tests per day. Exploratory testing encourages us to act role play as the end-user and detects more realistic bugs.

Exploratory testing is highly helpful in agile environments and has several advantages, as seen above. QA teams can successfully use this testing strategy for their own success in the agile development process by knowing its benefits and using reliable test management software like the Xray Exploratory App.

Author

Sérgio Freire, Head of Solution Architecture & Testing Advocacy at Xray

Sergio Freire is a solution architect and testing advocate, working closely with many teams worldwide from distinct yet highly demanding sectors (Automotive, Health, and Telco among others) to help them achieve great, high-quality, testable products. 

By understanding how organizations work, their needs, context and background, processes and quality can be improved, while development and testing can “merge” towards a common goal: provide the best product that stakeholders need.

Xray is an EXPO Platinum partner at EuroSTAR 2023, join us in Antwerp

Filed Under: Agile, Exploratory Testing Tagged With: 2023, EuroSTAR Conference, exploratory testing, software testing tools

The EuroSTAR Huddle Deep Dive Week: Agile Edition

April 1, 2021 by Ronan Healy

Recently EuroSTAR Huddle hosted the first Deep Dive Week. The first edition was a Agile week with some testing experts exploring all aspects of Agile. Over the course of five days, six experts in Agile discussed and explored, answered your questions on every aspect of Agile. From documentation to Quality, automation to metrics, weekly schedules to team motivation, everything was taken apart, discussed and put back together with some excellent questions from an engaged audience. If you didn’t get to attend or are curious what took place, let’s take a look back at the week’s activities.

Gitte Ottosen kicked off the week with an insightful exploration of Quality. She looked at measurements and metrics, what is value and, in particular, the VOICE model and the Goal Question Metric, and how this could be beneficial to your team.

Wednesday heralded our first AMA of the week with Bob Galen who focused on testing in Agile contexts attracting a wide variety of questions. He discussed quality related metrics, where automation fits in Agile and test strategy in Agile projects.

Also on Wednesday, Selena Delesie joined us to explore peer to peer relationships in Agile and how to get the best out of your team. She shared some real-world examples from her own career on how to communicate within your own team and how you should think about working with others including management.

agile week

Next up, Hanna Dernbrant shared her story of migrating from Waterfall to DevOps. This included the role of the tester in DevOps, her weekly schedule and how her team works. I think we were all fascinated by her meetings!

Later on Thursday, Lisa Crispin held our second AMA. Looking at Testing in Continuous Delivery, Lisa answered many of your excellent questions. She shared her thoughts on test plans for fluid projects, use of mind maps, what metrics she recommends in CD projects, the best time to write automation tests in Agile methodology and lots more. A big shout out to Clare & Clare who came on screen to ask their questions!

Friday came all too quickly and the final live talk of our Agile Deep Dive was with Derk-Jan De Grood (a member of the EuroSTAR 2021 Programme Committee). Derk-Jan discussed Built-In Agile in an interactive and fun session. He explained the concept of built-in quality, gave some examples, discussed faults and its effect on the line, what should be maximum feedback times for different scenarios and answered lots of your questions.

The team at EuoSTAR Huddle are already working on the next Deep Dive week. We are sure it will be as engaging as the Agile week. In the meantime, stay tuned to EuroSTAR for the announcement of the EuroSTAR 2021 Programme which is happening very soon.

Filed Under: Agile Tagged With: agile

EuroSTAR Huddle Deep Dive: Agile

March 11, 2021 by Ronan Healy

It has been twenty years since seventeen software developers met at a resort in Snowbird, Utah and since then Agile has become the dominant form of developing software.  At EuroSTAR Huddle, we will be acknowledging this with our just announced EuroSTAR Huddle Deep Dive: Agile week. Taking place from 22-26 March, the EuroSTAR Huddle Deep Dive will feature seven speakers, all experts on Agile who will guide you through all things Agile.

So at EuroSTAR Huddle we have invited seven highly regarded experts on Agile and software testing. Over the course of one week they will share their expertise with you across seven live events.

During the week we have some of the best minds on Agile. We have two new events in two AMA (Ask Me Anything) sessions.  First off is Lisa Crispin, a leading expert and author of numerous Agile books. She will be taking part in an  on Testing in Continuous Delivery. Also taking part in another AMA is Bob Galen who will be exploring Testing in Agile Context. Both events give you the chance to put your questions to these Agile experts with a wealth of experience in Agile.

But there is more! We will also have live presented events with practical takeaways that you can apply with your team. Gitte Ottosen will be sharing her thoughts on Quality in Agile and in particular what it means for your customer. Derk-Jan de Grood will also explore quality focusing on built in quality and how quality is organised at the team level. Speaking of teams in Agile Selena Delesie will be joining the Deep Dive week to demonstrate how you can super-charge your agile team and create Agile super teams. Mia Johannsson will explore the four key cornerstones of Agile QA and its importance in the software development process. Finally moving from teams to the user level, Hanna Dernbrant is going to explore what it is like to move from Waterfall to DevOps and what experiencing that sort of change can be like.

With this great quality (no pun intended) of speakers and minds on Agile, the EuroSTAR Huddle Deep Dive: Agile week is not to be missed. Plus there will be blogs throughout the week on all things Agile. Make sure to join us there.

Filed Under: Agile, DevOps Tagged With: agile

Agile Testing: 6 Top Talks at EuroSTAR Online

July 10, 2020 by Fiona Nic Dhonnacha

With most companies practicing a version of agile methodology in their software development and testing, building on this is key for the future of testing: continuous integration, DevOps, and new trends in AI and ML are all changing the way you work.

Join leading experts from the testing community to learn about the latest trends in agile testing, solve tricky test issues, adapt to new forms of testing – and become the best at what you do.

Scrum and Kanban – Addressing Real Life Agile Testing Challenges | Fran O’Hara

Are you using Scrum, Kanban, or a hybrid of both? Do you have challenges with test and quality in these contexts? This tutorial is for you.

Get insights into key implementation challenges impacting quality, and test when these frameworks are used individually or in combination with each other. Test and quality related topics initially introduced will include common challenges experienced with team culture, team competencies and Dev-QA integration; user stories and backlog refinement; visualising and integrating testing into the work stream and more.

Plus, a significant element of this tutorial will give you the opportunity to identify your own test and quality challenges with the class, and vote on what challenge should get more focus, and interactive group discussion.

At the end of the tutorial, you will leave with a suggested list of ideas/tips and experiments to try to help address common challenges introduced in the class. You’ll also have access to all the learning materials.

Key Takeaways:

  1. Deeper insights into implementation challenges impacting quality and test when Scrum and Kanban are used individually or in combination with each other
  2. Suggested practical solutions to the real world issues being encountered now and as your team and organisation evolves.
  3. New ideas to enhance your effectiveness in agile testing

View Talk

Testing SAFely – Finding your way in the Scaled Agile Framework | Gitte Ottosen

Being a tester or test manager in a scaled agile framework can sometimes be a bit like being lost in the jungle; there are many strange animals there (new agile roles), and you have to learn to behave differently compared to the city in order to survive (ceremonies, life cycle). But, as time passes you learn new skills and maybe even change your mindset. You may find that the jungle isn’t that bad after all.

You might not turn out to be Tarzan or Mowgli – but you find ways to live and thrive in the new environment.

Gitte Ottosen took the journey to the wild, being a test manager and quality coach, trying to find her way in the jungle called SAFe. Based on her experience from several agile release trains, she will give you her insights on some of the challenges, along with several practical ways to solve them.

Key Takeaways:

  1. What to test – Safe says built in quality, what test does that result in?
  2. Where to test – Team Vs. Train
  3. Who drives test – The test manager as a coach

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The Green Traveller – Prioritizing Your Backlog to Make an Impact | Derk-Jan de Grood

Is your businesses a green traveler organization? Learn how to order your backlog based upon business value and define a roadmap that delivers a workable release. Using the slogan: “Get out the plane take the train”, the Green Traveler aims to expand travel coverage in Europe by combining and linking train and aircraft services, to enable an environmentally friendly one-stop-shop.

Help your organization by sorting their backlog in such a way that it yields in releases with e2e business value that provide fast feedback loops for the business.

While collaborating online with fellow participants, you’ll explore the role of testing as a measure to create feedback and assess whether the roadmap should be altered to optimize for testing. In additional rounds we’ll explore the impact that DevOps and IT improvements have on the road map and we’ll check whether the technical solution we defined aligns with the company goals. Participants of this workshop will gain insight in how to find routes through the forest and influence the planning of the development project, become part of the hunter’s team and hunt for quality, rather than be stuck in the wild.

Key Takeaways:

  1. Learn how to effectively sort a product backlog based on value
  2. Experience different ways to define a roadmap with clear releases
  3. Understand the impact of testing, improvements and DevOps on the release planning

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Taming DevOps | Hanna Dernbrant

When Hanna started at Jayway, she went from a waterfall mindset into working with DevOps. It was like going into the jungle, down the rapids – without a paddle! Much like being dropped in a jungle, where you’d turn to explore; she did the same thing in DevOps, and turned to exploratory testing – with great success.

One major difference is that when working with the waterfall model, much like the zoo, your team/pack is the same kind as you; a team of testers. It’s safe and comfortable. In DevOps all of a sudden you’re the only one of your kind. In the DevOps way of working, the pack is different types of people with different strengths. I found that I became a coach for the rest of the team on how to work with quality as a team. It is in everyone’s interest to work together to achieve a good quality product. No one wants that phone call in the middle of the night that wakes you in a panic and cold sweat!

Key Takeaways:

  1. A practical example of how to work in DevOps
  2. How to face the challenge of going from waterfall to DevOps
  3. How to coach your DevOps team members on test and quality

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Continuous Delivery in 4 Months for 15 Teams and their 1 Monolith | Thierry de Pauw

15 teams, 1 shared monolith, 1 release every 6 months, and product demand for 1 release every 2 weeks. How do you know where to start with Continuous Delivery, when you’re surrounded by technology and organisational challenges?

This is the journey of 15 teams and their 1 shared monolith, at a federal Belgian agency. They increased their throughput from bi-annual releases to fortnightly releases in under 4 months, achieving a state of Continuous Delivery.

The costs and time for testing quality into the software product, stabilising and releasing the product during each bi-annual release were skyrocketing. The demand for Continuous Delivery was there, but the circumstances made it very difficult.

I’ll cover how we used the Improvement Kata, Value Stream Mapping, and the Theory Of Constraints to choose which changes to apply first, and kickstart the organisational changes we needed to improve quality and drive down lead times.

Key Takeaways:

  1. Be able to use the Improvement Kata to introduce change at scale.
  2. Be able to run a Value Stream Mapping workshop to understand the current situation.
  3. Be able to use the Theory of Constraints to identify which activity should be improved first and which experiment will be most likely to succeed.

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The Power of Diversity in Cross-Functional Mob Programming | Cindy Duflot

I am part of a team that does full-time mob programming. The team consists of 12 people from various disciplines (including web, iOS, Android), but only a smaller group does mob programming. In the mob there are two backend developers, one frontend developer, one ops and one QA. We do just about everything together: picking up a story starts at the white board and ends with a push to production.

We draw out the functional and technical analysis and consider what is the best possible API to build for the client apps. In the backend we build and test together. For the mobile apps, we have mob testing sessions in which everyone goes through the feature and writes down the oddities on a white board. Working in this fashion makes standups, planning, retro etc almost superfluous. There is always one item in progress and everyone is working on it. Pretty simple right?

Key Takeaways:

  1. Mob programming is more than a theoretical approach you read about on blogs. Some people actually do it and it works.
  2. Ask yourself how agile your team really is.
  3. Maybe you are triggered to start your own mob?

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Ready to elevate your agile testing? Book your ticket to EuroSTAR Online here.

Filed Under: Agile, EuroSTAR Conference

10 things you’ll learn in DevOps, Quality & AI [Webinar Series]

May 18, 2020 by Suzanne Meade

Join our May Test & Quality webinar series with our 3 testing experts, on 3 hot topics

Quality for DevOps teams with Rik Marselis

‘Deliver business value with the right quality at speed’. That’s what organizations ask of their IT teams. To achieve this, cross-functional IT teams need to work closely together. The DevOps culture is the enabler for this way of high-performance IT delivery, using an automated CI/CD pipeline to deliver at speed. But how do you deliver value with the right quality using DevOps?

Rik shares approaches, practical examples and concise explanations, to enable teams to implement quality engineering practices.

What You’ll Learn

  1. Deliver business value with the right quality at speed
  2. Incorporate quality engineering in the cross-functional teams
  3. Automate everything – as long as it is useful

SAVE MY SPOT

Agile Testing with Leanne Howard

COVID-19 has made us all look at the world in a different way, and many of us have been forced to change. We have all heard about websites crashing; the rise in hacking; apps not being accessible to everyone, and the strains on IT services. This all points to getting the cost of quality model right, and a higher focus on our customers’ needs.

Leanne will share experiments that you can try to accelerate your testing whilst still maintaining high quality and customer focus.

What You’ll Learn

  1. Some simple experiments to try
  2. Accelerating testing whilst maintaining quality
  3. How to focus on what the customer needs, now and into the future

SAVE MY SPOT

Quality and AI-based Systems with Adam Leon Smith

Looking to improve the quality of AI-based systems?

AI is a complex topic and is the biggest technical renaissance to impact testing for at least two decades. Adam will talk about intrinsic quality issues with AI, challenges in testing AI-based systems, and new techniques and methods.

He will also cover emerging AI-enhanced testing tools that are yet to get much coverage.

What You’ll Learn

  1. Key quality issues with AI
  2. Testing challenges with AI
  3. New ways of testing AI
  4. New tools that you won’t have heard of

SAVE MY SPOT

The Test & Quality Webinar Series is the latest series of online talks brought to you by EuroSTAR Conferences. For 2020, we will be taking the entire EuroSTAR Software Testing & Quality Conference online. See more details about the incredible talks you can attend.

Filed Under: Agile, DevOps, Webinar Tagged With: agile, DevOps, Webinar

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