This year at the EuroStar conference in Dublin, I was asked to do a 5 minute “Soap Box” talk. To me, that meant that I could do a little rant, so this is pretty much what I said, although perhaps not exactly. A while ago, someone came up to me and said “How should we […]
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Book Review: 50 Quick Ideas to Improve your User Stories by Gojko Adzic
In my opinion, this is a much needed book. I spend a lot of my time talking about testability of stories, and Gojko and David have given us many ideas about making our user stories more testable. There are 5 sections: Creating Stories, Planning with Stories, Discussing Stories, Splitting Stories, and Managing Iterative Delivery, with […]
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Lean Coffee at Agile Testing Days 2014, Potsdam, Germany
This is the third (maybe 4th) year that Lisa Crispin and I have hosted lean coffee in the Fritz pub. This year it was at 8:00 am which was a definite improvement from the 7:30 am time slot last year. Each year we seem to add an extra table so this year we had to […]
Read MoreDistributed Teams – my experience
Over the past decade or so, I’ve been working with teams that work in a distributed environment and giving advice about ways to make it work. Lisa Crispin (my co-author of Agile Testing) and I are a distributed / dispersed team of sorts. She lives in Denver, U.S. and I live in Calgary, Canada. While […]
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Agile 2013 – Stalwart Session
In August, I was at the Agile 2013 conference in Nashville Tennessee along with ~1700 people. I attended talks, participated in open space sessions, Lean coffee sessions, and multiple hallway conversations and learned from all of them. This year I didn’t give a talk but participated in the Stalwart stage which was one of my […]
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Book Reviews: Discover to Deliver and Impact Mapping
I recently read two new books: Impact Mapping by Gojko Adzic, and Discover to Deliver by Ellen Gottesdiener and Mary Gorman. I have posted both my reviews below, but I wanted to add a few words about the synergy I felt between them. I believe that if delivery teams use both techniques – Impact Mapping […]
Read MoreView into test planning at the release level
View into test planning at the release level One of the common pitfalls of agile teams is “Forgetting the big picture”. Lisa Crispin and I wrote an article for informIT in May 2012 http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1905881. Teams tend to focus on individual stories, and often don’t think about the feature or the system until the end game when […]
Read MoreUpcoming public courses and talks
I’m getting ready to go on a 2 month road trip through Europe and South Africa. I thought I’d put my schedule up here so folks can join me at the place closest to them. Aug 14-15th: Webinar: Automation on agile projects http://www.sqetraining.com/training/course/agile-test-automation Whole Team Approach to Agile Testing Course – Europe August 27–29: […]
Read MoreGraphic Recording of Awareness Session at Agile Testing Days
I attended Rob Lambert’s session “Do agile teams have wider awareness fields” at Agile Testing Days in Potsdam, Germany in November this year. The ‘doodle’ I have included in this blog is from that session. I learned about this medium from ImageThink who recorded all the keynotes at the Oredev conference in Malmo Sweden, and […]
Read MoreTesting the Big Picture
One of the top seven success factors that Lisa Crispin and I talk about in the summary chapter of our book Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams is “Look at the Big Picture”. We talk about using the agile testing quadrants to help think about all types of testing, and how […]
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