How Can You Prepare for Version 2.0?

Today, we welcome back our popular guest author, Renée Elizabeth Mineart.

It has taken me a considerable amount of time to get my head around this topic. I’m not sure, even now as I place fingertips to keyboard, it is the right direction for this blog. But I think it’s an important topic to cover and is perhaps not talked about often enough. So, I ask you to please, bear with me as we broach the murky waters of … (queue dramatic music) … Project Failure. 

Agile Strategies for Managing a Marketing Team with Scrum

As a multi-award winning software testing consultancy, nFocus live and breathe Agile. So much so that we decided to run our Marketing Team using Scrum. If you're interesting in learning about the benefits of adopting Agile from a testing perspective, check out this white paper instead. 

Identifying Common Themes in Scrum Testing

So I get to see lots of different organisations all trying to implement Scrum to varying levels, several themes come out:

Firstly, testers are sometimes excluded from certain activities/events or aren’t given an equal voice in the team. Sometimes they don’t understand that they have an equal voice that needs to be heard. The “Development Team” is supposed to be cross-functional which means that it should have testing or testers in it, don’t get me started on why we decided to call it the “Development” team.

Test, Test and Test Again

Here's the second in our series of bitesize blog articles on Agile Test Strategy. If you missed the first one, you can read it here. 

Now that you are ‘Ready’ to test, you want to test as often and effectively as you can; not only will this increase the chance that you'll find defects but will improve application quality. In the short-term your costs will increase as you’ll need to set up a defined framework and create re-usable test artefacts…

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.