Here are some resources we’re using in my Agile Testing Days USA workshop Refactoring Test Collaboration
Abstract
Collective ownership for testing starts with understanding testing. Rework your team dynamics to evolve past duplication and improve performance through whole team testing. Take home practical patterns for improving your team’s collaboration on testing. Because teams who own testing have more confidence in the customer value of their results.
As the Pragmatic Programmers say, “refactoring is an activity that needs to be undertaken slowly, deliberately, and carefully,” so how do we begin? In this session, we will experience the complex interactions of an agile team focused on demonstrating customer value by answering a series a questions:
- Where do testers get their ideas?
- How are you planning to accomplish this proposed testing, tester?
- Why not automate all the things?
- Who is going to do this manual testing and how does it work?
- How do we know whether we’re testing the right things?
Build your own list of TODOs from these various practical collaboration approaches and begin deduping your team’s testing for a better first day back at the office.
Key-Learning
- Approaches to handle objections to executing the testing work
- Ways to mentor test helpers, including pairing
- Investing in testing the team believes in
- Understand how other team members have been testing the work so far
- Advising on opportunities to inject test thinking into all of the team activities, from story writing through to unit testing, to make the system more testable
Resources
Collaboration + failing at collaboration
WHOSE testing skills + Exploratory testing + Elisabeth Hendrickson’s Test Heuristics Cheat Sheet [PDF] + book Explore It!
Walking Skeletons, Butterflies, & Islands + my blog post elaborating on the conference
Big Visible Testing + my blog post elaborating on the presentation
Testing pyramid + critique of the testing pyramid/alternatives
eBook: Katrina Clokie’s A Practical Guide to Testing in DevOps + Role mapping
Westrum model + organizational culture & safety
Linda Rising’s change patterns & books on Fearless Change
High Performance Practices [PDF] + book Accelerate
Empathy-Driven Development + empathy practices
Many interactive aspects of my workshop were inspired by Sharon Bowman’s book Training From the Back of the Room
facilitation book Collaboration Explained
metrics book Measuring and managing performance in organizations
book Testing Extreme Programming + some follow-up thoughts
Soon to come! Claire Moss on Let’s Talk About Tests, Baby podcast