Super Manager

I wanted to take a moment and thank all of you who have recently attended the Persona Based Testing & Risk Assessment Presentation at the Software Test Professionals Conference. The session was well attended and the conference on a whole was also wildly successful, not to mention that San Diego is just downright outstanding.Looking forward to seeing you all at the next STP session.  As promised, here are the links from the presentation:

Unleash Your Agile Super Manager

The Agile 12 Step Program

The 10 Little Things

There you have it. Please do reply and let me know what you thought of the presentation

Testing With Personas

I wanted to take a moment and thank all of you who have recently attended the Persona Based Testing & Risk Assessment Presentation at the Software Test Professionals Conference. The session was well attended and the conference on a whole was also wildly successful, not to mention that San Diego is just downright outstanding.Looking forward to seeing you all at the next STP session.  As promised, here are the links from the presentation:

Persona Based Testing & Risk Assessment Presentation

The Agile 12 Step Program

The 10 Little Things

There you have it. Please do reply and let me know what you thought of the presentation

Becoming Crappie At Agile

I wanted to take a moment and thank all of you who have recently attended the Become Crappie at Agile Presentation at the Mile High Agile Conference. The session was well attended and the conference on a whole was also wildly successful. I feel some people in other states could stand to learn a ton from the way that this regional conference is run. As promised, here are the links from the presentation:

Crappie Agile Presentation

The Agile 12 Step Program

The 10 Little Things

There you have it. Please do reply and let me know what you thought of the presentation

Just when I thought I had seen the icing on the cake, I was invited to do an interview for UTest as part of their Testing The Limits Series! In my opinion, I feel this session went AMAZING! It really did give people a glimpse at what the Scrum And Agile Community think of Testing and testers. It also opened doorwars for discussions with an entirely different audience regarding how we can better work together! Spider Mans Uncle got it right, “With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility”. I have been fortunate in my Agile path and have really been able to meet some amazing people that have taught me all that I know. What makes me the most happy is the opportunity to give back. Thanks to all of you for your support and encouragement. Now go read the the interview, leave me a comment please, and set your sights on the approved copy of the Agile 12 Step Program as part of our next post.

Stay Agile My Friends!

Product Owner Snow Bakes the Perfect Pie!

Product Owner Snow & The Seven Angry Dwarfs…

Many people must have fallen out of their chair when they read the title of my talk that was accepted for the Agile 2012 Conference. I am so very excited to speak to the world about this topic. Here is the background information:

Product Owner Snow loves her job, but hates that seven little stakeholders are constantly trying to manipulate the backlog and stick their finger in her pie. She is always willing to do what it takes to help others be happy, but she is no pushover.

In today’s Agile climate, people always have a say as to which items should be included as part of a release, sprint, or any other form of incremental delivery. The bigger problem is when you have multiple people trying to drive the direction of the product and they all have a different idea of what should be the most important thing to work on.

The even greater difficulty involves the executives attempts to have predictability as to what work will make it into the 90 day release cycle. While they endorse Agile and believe and enjoy the ability to inspect and adapt, they still need some sense of confidence and predictability in what will be included. Traditional release planning processes for long term, (longer than a couple of iterations out), are normally performed way too late in the process and in general are 30-40% accurate. This accuracy rate and the amount of time to get these estimates is simply unacceptable.

I invented Rapid Release Planning back in 2008 after years of research and a culmination of teaching methods taught by other Agile professionals. To quote Kenneth Rubin in his book Essential Scrum, we need to define and get to ready. There is a certain amount of planning and preparation that goes into baking the perfect pie, (backlog). My session on Thursday will teach you to assess the use of Business Priority, MoSCoW, T-Shirt Sizing, Gut Instinct Story Mapping, Dependency Identification, and Team Collaboration to yield a result that has proven to be 80-85% accurate and can be done for hundreds of stories in under an hour! I hope you all REALLY enjoy the workshop and I am looking forward to your feedback!

Rapid Release Planning Session PDF

One additional interesting conundrum is the fact that many groups who proclaim to understand and embrace Agile principles fail to embrace true Agile testing methods. This leads me to the question, so you think you can test? Here are a few quick tips that can assist you in embracing the testing you should be doing and help your organization take testing to the next level:

1) Engage Early and Often – Review Acceptance Criteria early in the process and start writing tests as soon as humanly possible. Establishing a test first mentality is vital to the success of the testing effort and having failed tests to set to pass eliminates the possibility of gold plating for the rest of the team.
2) Establish a Testing Standard - Set a standard for how tests, test cases, and test suites will look and feel. Make it a altruistic style guide for how any test related materials should look, feel, and flow.
3) Embrace Automation - Take advantage of technology and automate your unit and regression tests. Take the time to establish what the right threshold is based on your offering and make certain you have maximum happy path test coverage just to make 100% certain that you have accounted for how the majority of end system users will engage with the product you have built.
4) Create a Test Driven Mentality - In my world, we do not start coding anything until a valid test is in place. This should be common and normal. Do not be fooled to believe that test driven design and or development is not an option. Go with the natural instinct that I am certain each of you possess and push for this to happen.

Later today I will have the privilege to present at the Software Testing Professionals Conference in New Orleans Louisiana. I will have a chance to speak to the topic of Identifying, Managing, and Eliminating Technical Debt. My hope for each of you is that this can serve as a springboard to help you and your organization better embrace a more pure form of Agile Testing. In fact, I challenge each of you to dig a little deeper and do a little soul searching to see if you can identify one area where you may be able to improve in your testing efforts. Get rid of the technical debt and step out of the shadows and into the light. The fact is, I KNOW you can test.

Having traveled the wold over and visited with MANY of the Fortune 100 companies, it has been refreshing to note that many large enterprise companies are starting to recognize that Agile is a viable solution. It has also been great to see with the growth of information available regarding Agile better practices that vanilla applications of any one method are drifting to the wayside allowing for natural better organizational practices to settle in. The bigger question remains, how much better are we today than we were 1 year ago? 3 years ago? 5 years ago? Are we taking the steps needed to progress towards success?

The one commonality I see between being a real father and an Agile Dad, is that I find I am often giving advice to companies. Just like with children, sometimes they think they are smarter than you are, and that the decisions they make are better than yours because what could you possibly know that they do not. The truth be told, these organizations eventually shape up and realize that the fatherly advice was appropriate and was given to yield a positive result. Sometimes it is just hard to hear that your baby is ugly or needs some work.

I VERY carefully selected the image for this post because the meaning is both geeky and actually runs pretty deep. Many times organizations do not like what their Agile Dad (Agile Mentor or Coach), exposes. Many times they would rather wallow in denial or self pity about their situation than ever search for the deeper meaning of where they could be. I am not looking to this post to endorse the dark side, but I am certainly hoping to leave you with the message that although things may not look and feel perfect all of the time, facing our challenges and overcoming them bring us great joy and satisfaction. If Agile were ‘The Force’, may the force be with you! Happy Fathers Day and I look forward to your comments.

Come see me at StarEAST 2011!