Testing in Agile

Interesting article on the place of dedicated testers in Agile. So far I haven't seen much demonstration of the benefits or problems of dedicated testers in Agile teams with the use of metrics etc, but at least this puts some discussion points together around the issue.

Too often I have heard developers say they test the code 'very well' and unless they are TDD guns, it's likely I could write another umpteen tests that assess more critical parts of the system/function/blancmange on top of their tests. This is mainly due to developers not being taught testing skills, just as few testers are taught development skills. With that in mind, and considering that the developer's strength is in their ability to write code, and to continue with the theme, a tester's strength is in their ability to skeptically analyse a specification and consider the most critical parts to test with well constructed and organised scenarios that expose predicted weaknesses.

Therefore a dedicated tester, or at least a part resource that can evaluate the story/requirement with such criticality that additional test cases (and hence defects discovered) are designed that otherwise would have been missed.

Perhaps this isn't even restricted to Agile but should encompass all IT projects; there seems to be a concept that testing is a tiresome necessity but we have forgotten why. The main reason it is there, is to provide a deep and skeptical appraisal of the system, on the behalf of the customer or end use. Who is the best person to do this? Do you read other independent reviews of a car that you are interested in buying? Do you buy a car without having a test drive first? Do you expect that the manufacturer does some internal testing? I started off on foody type analogies with cooks, chefs and waiters, but they all amount to the same thing; you expect a product to have a variety of levels of quality assessment (notice I didn't use quality assurance) before you even get close to it. I mean, would you buy an Operating System or some such thing that required the customers to perform their own defect detection activities?

Agile Research

Trying to get notes together to provide a bit more meat behind a course presentation. I always reckon a mix of real-world anecdotes, theoretical approach, and a whole bunch of tools and tricks, supported by plenty of hands on provides the right approach. Some people's learning style is about getting dirty with stuff, some like talking about it at breaks, some like listening, others like drawing diagrams to express themselves, while some like taking notes. There are some that require energetic debate for it to be taken on-board.

Anyways there is some great stuff out there for Agile these days, and being loving caring hoooomans there is plenty of sharing going on.

Great Agile cheat sheet.

Scrum Cheat Sheet

• Great blog with some nice links here on xprocess and their site here
• Another blog here with some good stuff on velocity.
• Version One have a good Agile 101 here
• Good site with definitions and graphs here.
• Another good but of course obvious place to start research is with the various relatives of Agile such as ScrumAlliance which has a good glossary of terms.
• Agile FAQ is here.
• Another good blog which describes the estimation process in Scrum is found here.

Ashes to Ashes

I don't think there is anything more to say.

Ethics in business

Consider a hypothetical situation.

Imagine you had been asked to provide a test manager type resource to an organisation. You provided one of your most experienced staff members, then looked to backfill (as that person performed other tasks). You found a suitably experienced resource and started bringing them in.

What if the real true blue Aussie company, say, oh I don't know a Christmas Catalogue company, decided that the resource you had presented wasn't appropriate. The company might suggest that your person didn't offer the right 'cultural fit', and that they had come to that decision in 2 or 3 hours of your person being there. What if the person you had put forward had genetics based around the asian region? What if you suspected this company of being racist? What would you do? Would you find someone else? Would you tell them to stick their tinned meat products and cheap festive garb up their comfortable white blinkered behind, or would you try and educate them? Or would you kowtow to them?

While this is of course a hypothetical situation I certainly want to strive for only working with ethical companies. The rational arguments against discriminative behaviour far outweigh any emotional argument for. After all, if we were truly racist, wouldn't we send the entire population of immigrants (even the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th generations) back to Europe and leave it for the indiginous population.

Anyway, like I said, this is all hypothetical, but inspired by a news article that surprised me regarding the number of death threats Obama gets per day.