Articles
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Shifting Testing Left Is a Team Effort There is a lot of talk in the testing world about shifting left. Basically, “shift left” refers to moving the test process to an earlier point in the development process, independent of the development approach. This article explores a case in which shift-left has been applied, and the lesson is that shifting left cannot be achieved by testers alone—it must result from a team effort. |
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For Sustainable Test Automation, Look beyond the Surface When it comes to achieving sustainable test automation, having an appropriate test automation team structure in place is the most important first step to take. This article has some proven practices for a few different test automation adoption scenarios—led by an automation team or a regression team, and with agile adaptations—that have helped organizations enjoy long-term test automation success. |
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Rowing in the Same Direction: Use Value Streams to Align Work Ambiguity abounds about value streams, so it’s good to clarify what they are, why they matter, and how to exploit them. It's important to help employees understand the organization's definition of value, to provide visibility on how business value is created, and to focus on the fast flow of value through the value streams. If everyone understands which direction to row the boat, they can steer toward it together. |
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Agile Trends to Watch in 2018 With 2018 well underway, it seems like a good time to look ahead and think about what we hope to accomplish this year. Find out which agile trends these software experts are most looking forward to in the coming months. |
Better Software Magazine Articles
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5 Ways to Pair Developers with Testers Some agile practices stress the importance of pairing team members together to achieve better team performance. Try these five suggestions for pairing key resources. |
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Building Autonomous DevOps Capability in Delivery Teams After setting up a DevOps team and adopting continuous delivery practices, product releases may not be as smooth as they could be. The missing ingredient requires empowerment and autonomy. |
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Scaling Agile Thinking through Empowered Teams Just because a software team adopts agility doesn’t mean they’ll see results. Being flexible has its benefits, but ensuring that the team is given total responsibility to make decisions may be more important. |
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Bridging the Bimodal Divide between Waterfall and Agile Most software developers are in either the agile or the waterfall camp. Agile is required to be competitive, but many enterprise processes still rely on waterfall practices for stability. They can coexist. |
Interviews
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8 Ways to Ruin Your One-on-Ones: An Interview with Jason Wick
Video
In this interview, Jason Wick, senior manager at MakeMusic, discusses his STAREAST presentation about eight ways you could be making your one-on-one meetings completely useless. He discusses in depth what he feels is the number one way to ruin these meetings: holding back on feedback. He also offers advice on how you can educate your team leader to avoid the pitfalls that lead to ineffective one-on-ones. |
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Embracing Tools and Technology in QA: An Interview with Melissa Tondi
Video
In this interview, Melissa Tondi, senior QA strategist at Rainforest, discusses the foundation you need in order to have a positive introduction for new tools and technologies. She explains why the team leader has to understand what motivates each individual and how to get them excited about their job. Melissa says team members also have to realize that if they are in any way involved in testing software, they are a technologist, so they have to embrace the tools and technology that will continuously improve and streamline repetitive tasks. |
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Agile Transformation 101: A Conversation with Adam Auerbach
Video
Adam Auerbach, VP of Quality Engineering at EPAM Systems, chats with TechWell Community Manager Owen Gotimer about how an inexperienced team can start its agile transformation, the value of stand-ups and retrospectives, and how to make remote teams feel more connected. |
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Finding Microefficiencies in Agile Practices: An Interview with Melissa Tondi Melissa Tondi discusses retuning your standard agile practices to better engage the project team, enabling them to write code that will pass testing and free testers to assume the role of user advocate. |
Conference Presentations
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Lean Leadership and Systems Thinking in Agile Adoptions
Slideshow
When teams self-organize, they need an effective ecosystem that enables them to collaborate, communicate, and work effectively. Creating such an ecosystem is management’s responsibility. Lean thinking tells us to focus on these systems where people are operating. We can do because we trust our teams to be motivated and do their best. Lean thinking provides a holistic view for the work done in an organization, which is even more important when a company doesn’t already have an agile culture. In this case, management must consider that it’s easier for people to work their way into a new way of thinking than to think their way into a new way of working. Join Al Shalloway as he discusses the critical role that managers have in agile adoptions. |
Al Shalloway
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Reality-Driven Testing in Agile Projects
Slideshow
Many agile teams rework previously deployed stories, even after plenty of in-sprint testing. Even well-groomed, refined stories, framed with typical, alternate, and error scenarios and gracefully described in well-formed Gherkin, continue to encounter all sorts of bugs. Software engineering consultant Rob Sabourin sees rework in over 20 percent of deployed stories, but he can show you how agile teams can drive rework down dramatically, often achieving near-zero rework after a story is done. Rob teaches teams to identify and implement relevant testing activities above and beyond those derived from well-formed requirements. He seeks out testing ideas relevant to what is really being changed in the technological solution, finds ideas based on what the user actually does in the workplace, and discovers rich test ideas based on the target environments. |
Robert Sabourin
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People Operations in a Teal Organization: Tools and Techniques from a Real Journey
Slideshow
The Lithespeed team first read Frederic Laloux's "Reinventing Organizations” in 2015. We immediately said ‘Hell yes, we are doing this - we should never work any other way!’ Fast forward 4 years, a couple conference presentations and a lot of trial and error. On our journey to Teal, we have undergone many transitions. We will share some of our challenges moving towards a deeper teal culture and our goal of developing tools for creating a system of organizational development and self-management. We will share our real-world experience using distributed decision making and organizational structure, self-management for the whole organization, People Operations, peer to peer feedback/engagement/performance reviews, financial transparency, open salaries, managing the business, and giving voice to the organization. |
Amanda Geary
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Pyramid Discussion: DevOps Adoption in Large, Slow Organizations
Slideshow
Are you in a large, plodding enterprise that's beginning, in the midst of, or considering a move toward DevOps? Unsure how or even if it will work, but know you have to make a move anyway? Do you want to hear from your peers about how they've managed so far? A pyramid discussion starts as a series of one-on-one conversations between the participants. After each pair hashes out their thoughts with each other, they join another couple to refine their points and hear pros and cons. After a while, those four join with four more, and so on until there is only one discussion, with everyone sharing and discussing. All attendees will get a chance to have their ideas and experiences heard while building on the thoughts and experiences of others. |
Gene Gotimer
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