agilequalityassurance.com

Question: What is the easiest and most cost effective way to implement exploratory usability testing prior to a release each sprint?
Answer: A bug bash between the teams on your project.

Regardless of whether your organisation has dedicated QA personnel or not, there comes a time when the people who have built a feature would like ’someone else’ to have a look at it prior to a release. Someone who will provide an objective, prejudice-free assessment of the work. This honest feedback is invaluable just before ‘flicking the switch’ and can save a lot of time and money, and prevent embarrassment.

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Recently I’ve been having discussions with various people on the ‘independence’ of a QA team/people in an organisation. Some have said there’s no way this can occur in a team using agile methodologies; others have said it’s essential to maintaining an effective and objective department devoted to improving product and process quality.

My view? It depends on the definition

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One project I worked on involved several suppliers designing and building separate modules to be used in the construction of the full product - this is nothing new in software engineering, but whilst I led the testing for one of the modules developed using (loose) agile methodologies (in fact, upon reflection, very loose! ), the other players used traditional ones. And boy did this make it chaotic!

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I’ve been reading about and getting involved in conversations on the difference between a traditional lifecycle tester and an agile one. As the way projects with these type of people differ quite drastically in places, there are plenty of ways to describe what an agile tester is - I’m going to stick my neck out and mention one, a developer of tests rather than production code.

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Reading blogs & books etc provides a great deal of background information on any topic, but it’s also very good (if not necessary) to augment that with attending conferences.

Taking time out from the day to day work problems and spending it instead on listening to experts in the field, meeting them and having the opportunity to pick their brains face to face, this can refocus you and prevent getting bogged down with particular problems.

So, I’d recommend as many people in the Spain area to go to this :-

www.qatest.org

The Spanish software test community needs to work together to raise the profile of testing and agile QA in general.

Well, it’s been quite a while since I posted anything and in that time I’ve since entered a new software producing environment. It’s working with agile again, which is great, but has a change to my existing experience in the area as there are multpile projects producing multiple products.

At the moment numerous teams (containing the usual mix of product owner, scrum master, developers and user experience personnel) are working on their product. There is a QA team who’s task is to provide resources to all - and yes, the usual story persists in that there aren’t enough of us to go round!

So this raises the question, how to provide the best possible QA services when you can’t work on a project 100% of your time?

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There is a lot of documentation available on agile methodologies, both on and offline, detailing processes to introduce and how best to organise teams etc. This information is very useful for people/companies wishing to change the way they work, but a key principle needs to be there beforehand - discipline.

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Through the evolution of the practice of QA in agile teams, a high degree of quality can now be added to product development. Not only can thorough tests be designed, written and executed within a single iteration, the use of post-mortem analysis allows for team reflection and, as a result, process improvements.

So how best to perform QA in say a two week iteration? One way is as follows :-

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I’m interested in defining the best metrics to use for checking whether the product quality is improving as time, and sprints, pass by. One obvious factor is the number of automated tests passing in the continuous integration builds related to the coverage of functions in the code.

Or is it? Do the tests literally show the product quality? What if the finished article isn’t what the customer wanted? There are then a suite of tests making sure that the software does something it’s not meant to.

Number of defects? Measured against what? The list of possibilities goes on, what I’d like to find out are tried and tested measurables. Does anyone have a list they use in every project?

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