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Tutorial A

Shaping Testing – A Simulation in Scrum

Fran O'Hara

09:00-17:00 CEST Tuesday 7th June

Scrum and its hybrids are reported to be used in about 80% of organisations using agile. Although many organisations now have high levels of maturity with agile, the majority are still at earlier stages in their evolution. One of the challenges they face is quality and testing. This tutorial will surface many of the key reasons contributing to this. It will look at Scrum through a quality and test lens. It will give you as a tester the insights, knowledge and skills to help shape your teams approach to quality and testing throughout the agile lifecycle. In this simulation you will work as part of a Scrum team focusing solely on the test and quality-related aspects.

You will receive

  • An overview of the product and organizational context
  • Profiles on the Scrum team members
  • A prioritized product backlog as part of your first Minimal Viable Product (MVP)

 

Note: In every exercise below, the output each team produces will be compared and contrasted with a suggested solution provided by the tutor.

Sample team exercises:

  • Building quality into user stories: Decompose the sample features/epics from the Product Backlog into a set of User Stories to meet the INVEST criteria.
  • Quality risk: Analyse quality risks with these user stories
  • Sprint planning: a). Create the key elements of the test approach for the sprint. There will be a set of test strategy decisions to make from a list of options and practices provided. Sample topics will include the Definition of Done, Static testing, unit/integration testing approach, story and feature level testing, non-functional testing, regression strategy, use of techniques, potential CI/CD pipeline model, etc. b). Create a list of test tasks
  • Test design: Create test cases and exploratory test charters for selected stories
  • Retrospective: Finally, we will step outside of the simulation to perform a retrospective on the tutorial content to highlight learnings/improvement actions to bring back to your teams

 

During the simulation, you will also be faced with a series of challenges/scenarios often faced by testers during the sprint.  Teams will have a set of options to discuss and then select from to address these – sample answer with rationale then provided. Examples will include team dynamics/collaboration issues, test impediments raised in the daily scrum, estimation issues, automation problems, testing pushed to the end of the sprint, etc.

What you will learn

  1. Provide quality and test leadership to help your team create an effective test approach and deliver the benefits of whole team thinking
  2. Acquire the knowledge and practical skills to perform better backlog refinement, sprint planning and other key elements of the Scrum framework from a quality/test perspective
  3. Learn how to approach the typical test and quality problems Scrum teams face

Session Details

  • Intermediate
  • 7 hrs
  • Interactive Tutorial
  • Agile / DevOps
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Watch this video from Fran O’Hara to learn more about his tutorial, ‘Shaping Testing – A Simulation in Scrum’.

We look forward to welcoming you to EuroSTAR 2022.

Session Speaker

Fran O'Hara EuroSTAR Awards

Fran O’Hara

Director – Inspire Quality Services, Ireland

Fran has over 35 years experience in the software industry working in various roles in development, test, management and professional consulting. He co-founded and successfully grew a software testing services organisation which was ultimately acquired by Sogeti/Capgemini. For the last 15 years he has been providing independent coaching, training and mentoring in Agile and Lean to a wide range of organisations. He has a particular focus on quality, testing and associated practices. Fran is an international speaker, a co-organiser of Agile Tour Ireland and a co-founder of the Irish SIG in Software Testing – SoftTest. His tutorial, ‘Metamorphosis – Moving to Agile and Staying Agile’, was voted best tutorial at EuroSTAR 2016 in Stockholm.

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