Don't Go Chasing Waterfall to Guide Your Agile Testing
Will Machine Learning and AI Replace Manual Testers?
If you read mylast blog, you might remember that I mentioned thatsome people thought that Agile had killed QA. Well, here we are again. In this blog, we are talking about the possible demise of another aspect of traditional testing. This time the aggressors areMachine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. The victim is manual testing.Will Machine Learning and AI replace manual testers?The short answer is no. The longer answer is heck, no! My money is on manual testers continuing to...
QA Process in Agile: Avoiding Silos, Pro Whole-Team Approach
Who is Responsible for Software Quality in Agile? The QA process in agile differs greatly from QA in traditional testing, such as in Waterfall.Agilehas changed the way we think of software quality. In fact,I have read rumblings in the blogosphere that Agile has killed QA.I promise youQuality Assuranceis alive and well on agile teams.It just looks different than what most of us are used to. I think people who have promoted the “death” of QA in agile are not looking closely enough at...
Building a Quality Software QA Team: Quality at Every Level
In thelast blog, we made the case that everyone on theagileteam owns quality and provided some ideas on how team dynamics can help build quality into the product. In today’s post, we will discusssome additional ideas on how your software QA teams can work together and ensure quality is on the forefront of everyone’s mind when building a product. As we noted in our previous post,waterfall tended to equate testing and quality, which can lead to all kinds of bad habits – the main one being...
Quality in Testing: Everyone's Responsibility
Once upon a time, in the land of Waterfall, the business analysts wrote the requirements, the developers coded the requirements and the Testers tested the requirements. Each of these people sat in his/her ivory tower, um, silo and did that which they had always done since the beginning of time.Quality was thought to be synonymous with testing, and therefore was considered to exist solely in the Tester’s realm. Present Day Quality Fast forward to today, on an agile team and the...
Moving from doing agile to BEING agile
Are you an experienced tester who has recently joined an agile team? Maybe you have testing experience but until now it has only been on traditional waterfall projects. Are you going through the motions with this new way of doing things but don’t feel like you’re completely invested? Do you even feel like you’re adding value to your team? Often times, when a company begins their agile transformation they think they are BEING agile when in fact they are justdoing it. Being agile takes...
A Case for Quality... We Don't Need No Stinkin' QA
After 20 years in quality assurance, I’m still surprised to hear about companies that don’t have formal QA processes. Even more surprising are the companies that say having a QA function is not necessary. Maybe they are a newer tech company with a tiny, tight-knit development team and the software complexity hasn’t reached a level where defects reach a critical mass or perhaps the company doesn’t support a formal process even though it’s happening in some manner. For me, it is akin to saying...
How an Old Test Lead Got Agile
1. Seek Out Advice from the Experts, Inside and Outside 2. Communicate Often and To a Wide Audience 3. Know What the Risks Are and Call Them Out ASAP 4. Get to Know Your Product Owner 5. Don’t Get Caught Up in What You Think You Know 6. Get to Know Your Developers 7. No More Multi-Tasking 8. Embrace the Retrospective 9. Slow Down (a Little) and Enjoy the Ride I spent eighteen years testing before I ever worked withagile. When I suddenly found myself transitioning to an agile team...
Caught in the Middle: How To Balance Agile Team Needs with Wayward Management Requests
Your Manager Asks for a Massive Test Plan During a Two-week Sprint Your Manager Asks for Resource Estimates for the Next 6 Months Your Manager Asks for a Detailed, Metrics-driven Daily Status Report Your Manger Thinks This is Doing Agile Wrapping Up