Questions to Fine-tune Your 'Ready' Definition

Welcome to the first in a series of bitesize articles we're writing on Agile and Testing.

Creating a robust and practical Agile Test Strategy should exist in all organisations that employ an Agile approach to delivering projects and programmes of work. Being ‘Ready’ to test is vital to the success, having just a set of requirements isn’t enough….

Agile Testing Practices

Agile Project Management is the focus on producing a quality product by the continuous improvement, project team support, and providing flexibility in the requirements and scope, not to mention ensuring testing is performed in the most dynamic and efficient way possible to produce the desired outcomes. Performing good Agile Project Management is very important, to embrace the main principals of Agile to ensure the customer satisfaction through early and continuous delivery and to provide the best chance of the customer's competitive advantage by being first to market with new and innovating products and services.

Demystifying DevOps & Improving Software Quality

Now, let me guess? Whilst you are reading this article you can name a project that has run late, ran out of budget, not met the requirements, generally underperformed against budget or proved problematic when put live?

Never the less, there is some hope. DevOps has arrived and promises to save the day, but didn’t Agile promise this? Yes it did, but after the initial surge in the uptake of the Agile framework it did result in some Operational issues, mainly because little or no consideration was taken when putting iterations of new code into live for the operational impact.

Agile Test Strategy Part One

There have been challenges in the adoption of the Agile principles (an Agile Test Strategy) and Scrum Framework particularly with poor quality of the delivered software. This has resulted in delays and a mismatch of the expectations of stakeholders and delivery teams. There is no specific mention of testing or quality assurance in Agile or Scrum; it is implied as an integral part of the principles and framework. This has caused some confusion resulting in inconsistent approaches to quality management and testing. Often formal testing has been reduced to ad hoc ‘try it and see’ during a sprint. This loses the testing rigour that delivers quality by use of industry accepted full lifecycle testing.

The Impact of Regression Testing: Six Do's and Don't

• “Automated testing is easy using our tool!”
• “You just record your scripts and away you go! No coding is necessary."
• “Using this tool to automate your tests will reduce your costs and head count."

How many times have we sat across the table from tool vendors telling us this?! The truth is, automated regression testing is not easy, it takes the right strategy and planning to give you a fighting chance of getting it right. In our experience of working with clients who have tried to automate their testing, there are a number of common factors that caused them to fail to meet their intended objectives or give them any cost savings. 

Intro

During the last couple of months the nFocus team have enjoyed meeting hundreds of IT professionals at a series of events that include the IP Expo, Test Expo and many more. Whilst manning a stand for several days is exhausting on the legs, it is made worthwhile by the interesting (and sometimes bizarre) questions we’re asked. As you would imagine, the common themes included how testing fits into DevOps and interestingly Agile vs Scrum. This article is going to focus on the latter.