Day one of three days to delivering the knowledge and experiences in Agile Testing for the Whole Team workshop batch 4/2019 in Bangkok, Thailand

Testing is the whole team problem, then everyone is responsible for the testing and testing is an activity, not a phase,

Since Wednesday, December 11, 20019 to Friday, December 13, 2019, the 4th batch of the three days Agile Testing for the Whole Team course be held and delivered the knowledge and experience at SCK Dojo by Siam Chamnakit Co., Ltd. in Bangkok, Thailand.

The three days of Agile Testing for the Whole Team course that be developed by two experienced software testers and the authors of three books about testing in agile software development, Janet Gregory and Lisa Crispin. The workshop is under the programme of Agile Testing Fellowship (https://agiletestingfellow.com/).

Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory

The 4th batch of the course is including the eleven participants who are

• 2 x Product Managers
• 2 x Programmers
• 1 x Software Tester
• 3 x Software Development Managers
• 1 x Project Manager
• 2 x Scrum Master

and working in the software development team from eights companies and one university that mostly have experience in agile software development with Scrum framework, but testing is the end of the sprint.

Key deliveries of day 1, Wednesday, December 11, 2019

I started the day with the question, What problems is your team agile experiencing?. The answers are so interesting

• Top management thinks when using agile instead of the waterfall method, they are going to get all of the features within six months instead of a year.
• Using the Scrum framework but have a testing phase that executing the test by software tester and QA.
• Using the Scrum framework but have the individual Definition of “Done”, programmes have their own DoD, tester and QA have their own DoD, Product Owner has his/her own DoD, and top management don’t know what is DoD mean.
• In Sprint Retrospective, the developers and the tester fight and blame each other.
• Our agile is equal to the Scrum framework + Test-Driven Development (TDD) + DevOps tools + User Story + Jira, but nothing are ready to be shipped at the end of each Sprint.

I set the context of agile software development to the participants to the same page with

• Agile is a set of values, has a set of principles, and it is not a methodology.
• Agile is a term used that encompasses many different methodologies such as the Scrum Framework, the Extreme Programming, the Dynamic System Development Methodology (DSDM), the Crystal and the Feature Driven Development

Each of these methodologies has something in common

• They have short iterations or continuous delivery
• Each story or feature is not considered complete until the testing has been done
• The product team is the core
• Not the individual functional groups, accepts the reality
• Change is going to happen, so take the inevitable and work with that in mind.
• The business wants to see working software, not just documentation.

Agile is the term to describe methods

• to have fast feedback cycle.
• To require active participation from the business.
• To demand whole team collaboration.
• To test features as they are coded.
• To deliver business value at regular intervals based on a sustainable pace.
• To adapt their processes, skills, knowledge, tools, a relationship, both internal and external, based on feedback.

Extreme Programming (XP) is a software development method that follows the agile values and principles. XP has a specific set of good software development practices to follow.

Scrum is a project management framework which adheres to the agile values, but also has a specific set of practices to follow or at least start with but not has the particular set of good software development practices.

I highlighted the benefit of Test-First development to find bugs and defects before implementing. The Extreme Programming had it in the set of good software development practices.

Original picture from Dr.Alistair Cockburn (Agile co-thor)’s facebook.

Term Whole team is the everyday vocabulary of the workshop that equal to the Delivery team that including the people with all the necessary capabilities, skills and understand the business knowledge and technical knowledge so that the team can release the releasable product at the end of each iteration or cycle.

The Whole team

• responsible for the testing activities and quality
• collaborate among a team member
• a team member is a proactive person
• the developers are “Test Infected.”
• the testers think about the big picture
• the testers must be a trainer and supporter

Two common groups of obstacles of adapting agile software development values and principles are highlighted

• Culture barriers
• mini-waterfalls

and how to avoid them.

Preventing the defects over finding and tracking them is the key highlight and how to deal with the defects is leading the participants to gain the examples and shared experiences with zero-tolerance.

The participant’s key takeaways of the day 1

At the end of day 1, I asked the participants to write and share each person key takeaways, and some are so interesting

Previously some of the participants think agile is equal to the Scrum framework but in the workshop, they had been introduced the Extreme Programming (XP)and so interesting for them to explore the XP after the end of the workshop.

How does your team deal with defects? is the question that leading the participants to see how to deal with the defects and one of the participants shares the zero-tolerance is one of her key takeaways and need to adapt it when back to the company.

Zero-tolerance is zero known defects escaping an iteration.

The four steps of the zero-tolerance

1. Finding
2. Test-First
3. Fix, and
4. Forget

Then the whole team must focus on prevention defects, not tracking the defects.

When the defects found, don’t put them in the queues — fixed them immediately. If how to fixing the defects must take high efforts and complex then the whole team must estimate, prioritise and work with the Product Owner or the Customer to get a decision, fix them now or later.

Five steps of the test approach in an agile way are one the key takeaways that mostly the participants like and it’s useful.

How to adapt the good software development practices from Extreme Programming into the Scrum framework is one of the key takeaways that one of the participants is going to adopt them.

Testing is a phase and is visual on the big board as a column that labelled “ Ready to Test”, “Testing”, “Wait to Fixed”, Fixing” and “Retest” is my key takeaways of the day 1 that be shared from the participants who use the Scrum framework and kanban board.

Sunday, December 15, 2019
Laksi, Bangkok, Thailand