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~ using my evil powers for good

Category Archives: Agile

See you soon

30 Thursday May 2013

Posted by claire in Agile, Agile2013, CAST 2013, Experiences, Exploratory Testing, Scrum, Speaking, Training

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I’m excited to announce that I will be speaking at two conferences this year!

If you’re on your way to Agile2013 in Nashville in August, please stop by my full-length Big Visible Testing session in the experience report track. I simply didn’t have enough time to tell you all the cool stuff in my CAST 2012 emerging topic.
If you’re excited about trying exploratory testing with some in-person coaching, Matt Heusser and I will be there for you.
Or catch up with me some time that week to say hi.
Agile2013_Speaker_banner

 

 

 

 

If you’re on your way to CAST 2013 in Madison in August, start out your conference with my Walking Skeletons, Butterflies, & Islands: an agile journey experience report.
I look forward to fielding your questions about agile testing!
CAST2013_LessonsLearned

Sadly, my talks will not be streamed online this year, but you might enjoy the webCAST lineup!

Bedside manner

25 Thursday Apr 2013

Posted by claire in Agile, Approaches, Experiences, Soft Skills

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little_shop_horrors_dentist
This morning, stuck in the dentist’s chair again, I was contemplating with dread the work to be done. You see, I’ve had many dentists over the years and have only recently found one I like. It’s not the movie in the background to distract me, though that is nice. And it’s not the friendly manner of the staff, though that’s very important to me as well. It’s the deliberate communication.

Yesterday, at lunch, a friend and I were laughing at ourselves for having worked together in the past on a small team of 5 people and the communication problems that we had. While a larger team would certainly require more coordination, it is astonishing how easy it is for even a small, close-knit, co-located team to be deliberate about sharing information.

So back to sitting in this chair with the sound of the drill coming from the next exam room… When it is my turn, our 3 person team (dentist, hygenist, and patient) carefully coordinates the execution of today’s project with blow-by-blow commentary, making adjustments to each other as we go. And while the experience isn’t one I hope to repeat – you can bet my flossing will improve! – for the first time, I have complete trust in my dental team because they keep me constantly in the loop as a disciplined practice. And a little pain control doesn’t hurt either!

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Seize the Initiative

15 Thursday Nov 2012

Posted by claire in Agile, Context, Experiences, Experiments, Retrospective, Soft Skills

≈ 1 Comment

Antistress Autoreverse

So last year I joined the YMCA. My employer works in this space and they supplement our memberships … on the condition that we attend with a minimal frequency. Nothing to understand your customers quite like becoming their customer! However, working out isn’t really my thing. The “race to nowhere” has no appeal for me. But I went anyway, determined to learn something. Despite my stubbornness on that point, the inertia of years of study was hard to overcome. I needed backup.

Joining the coach approach program was explicitly about wanting to make improvements. The Y coaches promote “adopting healthy habits and changing the way [the participants] live their daily lives.” I knew I wanted to make a change, but I also knew that I didn’t want it badly enough to go it alone quite yet. Having never had a personal coach, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. What I encountered resonated with my recent experience learning about the role of ScrumMaster.

In particular the sprint activity of retrospective is “an opportunity to learn how to improve.” Defining success in this particular context was the first step. My ScrumMaster watched the process and guided it, making it okay to talk about uncomfortable topics, but it was up to me to do the work. The first big step was being able to establish a safe environment to talk with a more experienced and professional person about a potentially sensitive topic.

In the case of my workout routine, this was my minimal compliance rather than wholehearted adoption of lifestyle change. My Coach Approach coach helped me to develop a vision for the future that would be better than the past. We focused on setting goals while recognizing that the plan had to fit into my work/life balance with the loose structure of frequent check-ins rather than plugging my height, weight, and weight loss goal into a one-size-fits-all spreadsheet.

I was surprised to find that discussion about my health could be fun when my counselor was so friendly and supportive. I would have expected an intervention to be really uncomfortable. Retros can be that way sometimes. But they can also be a welcome change of pace. Roughly every 2 weeks – after we catch up on socializing and the excitement we’ve had since our last chat – my coach and I looked at the artifacts of my progress, paying attention to the time line of events going on in the background and how that influenced the results. Keeping this cadence allowed us to build a healthy relationship that encouraged risk-taking and speaking from the heart. So when my coach suggested adding a weights routine to my cardio, I felt fine with scoffing openly and she felt fine with reminding me of my goals, not allowing my emotions to derail the discussion but remaining fully present and focused.

As our meetings progressed, she offered appreciation of the progress I made, while encouraging me to try new approaches that could yield better results. Even when I felt like I was backsliding, she found a way to put more emphasis on understanding what I had accomplished and focused on encouraging me to keep going. We talked about what parts of the routine were working well, what lessons I learned (like when I hated the treadmill but loved the AMT – hey, participation in individual exercises is optional!), what I could do differently next time, and what might need more scrutiny. We tried to analyze the problems and propose solutions to the boredom, considering a variety of alternatives. It was honest but not accusatory. (Hey, eveybody gets bored with the routine.)

So I’ll admit she’s done me some good. I agree with another participant who said, “My personality is better, my production has gone up, my mental clarity has improved, and my energy level has increased dramatically.” Granted, I just have a lot of energy in general, so I wasn’t likely to sit back and passively take it in – well, as passive as you can be while sweating profusely. I started to recognize my excuses as just excuses, feeling more empowered to modify the situation, learning to manage that impulse to excuse myself from the hard work of changing. Accepting that I actually knew something about working out and lifting weights and could be responsible for designing more of the workout and analyzing my progress on the path to wellness? Yeah, last week was weird.

One ScrumMaster wrote, “At the end of a successful project, everybody says, ‘Gee, I wish we could do it again.’ Using this definition, was the project a success?” Well, I can’t say that I’ve enjoyed every moment of it, but figuring out that I could test software and sweat profusely at the same time? Priceless! But seriously folks, having my coach express sincere and significant appreciation for the care and work I put into making progress sent the message that she cared about and me personally, not just reducing the failure rate of some anonymous gym member. And that’s where the magic happens.

(Special thanks to my dev James who pointed out that coach approach is workout retro!)
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Big Visible Testing

07 Tuesday Aug 2012

Posted by claire in Agile, Approaches, CAST 2012, Context, Experiences, Experiments, Publications

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Presented as an Emerging Topic at CAST 2012

This was my talk proposal:

I have always thought of myself as an agile tester. After all, my development teams have always delivered features in 2 week sprints. My testing activities included reviewing requirements or stories before the planning meetings to assemble a list of questions and test ideas that I would use to approach the work proposed. I participated in a review before code completion that allowed for some exploratory testing, brief and informal though it may have been at times. In the past couple of years, I also planned and coded test automation.

However, over the past year, I have been transforming from a pseudo-agile tester to a true agile tester. Rather than sitting apart from the software developers in my own quality engineering department, I am now seated in the same room as the other employees from a mix of disciplines who are on my product delivery team. Rather than testing in a silo, I have been gradually increasing the visibility of testing activities through exploratory test charter management, defect backlog organization, and paired exploratory testing with both testers and non-testers. The feedback loops have shortened and the abbreviated time between activities necessitated adjusting how I provide information.

Testers are in the information business. We take the interests and concerns of the business as communicated through the product owner – or in my case the product owner team – and combine those with the needs of the customer as expressed in the story and further augment those with our experience using and analyzing software for deficiencies, abberations, and oddities. We draw upon a variety of resources including the experience and perspectives of fellow testers, heuristics, and product history to approach the goal of delivering a product the customer values, focusing especially on the quality aspects of that value.

Now that the audience for my testing comprises a mix of disciplines and the work environment has shifted from a heavier process to transparent, quick information access, I have been experimenting with different ways to execute testing and to represent the outcomes of that testing activity so that the information consumers understand it in ways that best suit each of their perspectives.

In my brief presentation, we will examine 3 different agile team member personas and their implications for presenting and maintaining testing information as well as the inherent tensions between their distinct and various needs. I will trace my learning curve of adjusting to their needs through the various experiments I have completed in this context, though these lessons extend beyond a purely cross-functional agile product development team.

Other testers will come away with a fresh perspective on viewing their product team members and focus on the value testing artifacts provide to a software development team.

Big Visible Testing from Claire Moss

See me live!

16 Monday Jul 2012

Posted by claire in Agile, CAST 2012, Context, Experiences, Experiments

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CAST is online streaming the keynotes and Emerging Topics track again this year.

Last year, I was haunting the interwebs watching, Tweeting, and chatting. This year, I’ll be coming to you live through the magic of technology. (This is the first reason I’ve had to crack open PowerPoint so it should be entertaining!)

Catch my agile software testing emerging topic talk Big Visible Testing at 10 AM PDT today!

Again, here’s the link to watch me:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/CASTLive

Update: Recording uploaded to YouTube

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Staying on track

24 Tuesday Apr 2012

Posted by claire in Agile, Automation, Experiences, Experiments, STAREast 2012, Volunteering

≈ 1 Comment


A while back, I was talking to Matt Heusser about my sticker shock when it came to conference attendance and he pointed me to his blog post on creative ways to reduce the cost:

No, you don’t have to be a speaker. That may be the most obvious, easy, usual way in, but there are plenty of ways to serve for people not interested in public speaking: you might serve on the program committee, work the registration desk, introduce speakers, organize lightning talks, or serve as a “runner” in some capacity.

I took one of his suggestions to heart and volunteered to be on staff at STAREAST this year, which gave me the opportunity to look behind the scenes this past Wednesday and Thursday. (Sure, I missed out on the awesome tutorials this time around, but I did get that one key day of floating peacefully in the pool.)

This is a considerable shift from last year’s STAREAST, when I was free to simultaneously learn about my professional needs while designing and executing my conference schedule. This became particularly apparent to me as the week progressed and I made new tester friends who turned out to be speakers, inviting me to their sessions and I just couldn’t shirk my duties. Bummer. I’ll know to look for their names in the program next time around.

This year, I put in my bids for track selections about a month ahead of time, based on the published schedule, and hoped at least one of my first choices would appear on my list. When my track chair packet arrived, I delightedly perused the list of my tracks and my speakers. On my roster were several notable testers and several newcomers. I loved knowing I would get a glimpse into the processes of both the polished professionals and the fresh first-timers.

I read over the instructions with a highlighter and multicolored pens, calling out the relevant details so that I could support these live performances without a hitch. I’m not good with form letters, and I feel that it’s fair warning to let others know that I have a more casual and enthusiastic style of interaction, so I drafted my own email for first contact. From there, all of the advance preparation went off without a hitch and I eagerly anticipated getting settled in on Wednesday morning.

Fortunately for me, my first track was Agile Testing, so the speakers were predisposed to understand iterating to better and better results. It helped that I knew the first few speakers from in-person and online interactions. Speakers aren’t the only ones who get nervous! One of my tester friends from Twitter was in the audience to help me work out the kinks of the tasks set before me and to tune my results to make things easier on all the session participants and to keep me from stressing out.

One thing I quickly realized was that my introduction of a speaker could hardly do him or her justice, especially when we had just met for the first time, so I resolved to keep it short and sweet, trusting everyone could read the program’s bio and knowing that we were all there for the benefit of the speaker’s wisdom, not my scintillating 30-second background recap.

Though troubleshooting the hardware was certainly on my mind, I was particularly concerned with making sure the session feedback was collected and returned to the conference organizers so that they could tabulate results and provide it to the speakers in a more succinct and organized way. I know from observation and discussion how much work speakers put into their presentations and how open they are to comments. Speakers care for their audience members!

The hardest part of track chairing for me was not being free to type, scribble, or live tweet all the wonderful information flying past me! Normally, I write everything down, but I had to take it in stride and trust that my familiarity with some of the material would carry me through. However, I was also supporting sessions I might not have chosen from the program since they seemed to have a focus that didn’t match my day-to-day duties or needs – so I snuck a moment here and there to note some new revelation. As it turned out, I gleaned some value from every session, despite my expectations. Sure, I don’t work on specialized medical hardware or ERP systems, but the generalizable lessons will stand in good stead as I broaden my understanding of the variations of software testing.

When it’s all said and done, when the conference attendees have all gone home, it’s the information transmitted that can make a difference in people’s work lives – and perhaps even their personal lives – that gave me a warm fuzzy feeling to go along with the sore feet.

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This could be real good

03 Friday Feb 2012

Posted by claire in Agile, Experiments, Retrospective, Scrum

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It's Groundhog Day!

Something is different.
– Good or bad? (Rita)
Anything different is good…
but this could be real good. (Phil)
— Groundhog Day

I’m a relatively young ScrumMaster, so I adopted a retrospective pattern that a colleague suggested to me at the beginning of my tenure. We have been using that same approach for sprint retros for 6 months and it gets the job done. Still, I found myself bored with doing the same old thing for our release retro this month and was concerned about not getting the desired benefit from the process. So I grabbed a promising technique from the Agile Retrospective Resource Wiki called the Four L’s, which Mary Gorman and Ellen Gottesdiener of EGB Consulting developed as a variation of the World Café since they “wanted some variety in eliciting feedback, collectively sharing that feedback and exploring action possibilities.”

The wiki suggests using the Four L’s for “iteration and project retrospectives as well as for retrospection of training and conference events” with a duration of 30 minutes to 2 hours. My 6-member cross-functional team used this technique to reflect on a release and limited our time to an hour, though that wasn’t a hard cutoff. In the context of our release retrospective and the hospitable space of our team meeting room, we gathered our diverse perspectives to explore questions that mattered about how our release went. I titled each of 4 large sticky notes Liked, Learned, Lacked, and Longed For, hanging them side-by-side on a single wall, which was a variation of the suggestion to move around the room. We set a timer of 15 minutes to generate initial feedback for all 4 categories simultaneously and began scribbling madly on uniformly yellow stickies with our Sharpies. Our team ran dry of serious contributions before the time was up, but I think time-boxing activities tends to drive us to get ideas out more quickly.

We read each sticky note’s single idea aloud and then clustered the notes around themes when there was overlap, listening together for patterns and insights. Then, we discussed the whole category among ourselves, hearing out each person’s comments with understanding and humor (we don’t take ourselves too seriously) since we encourage everyone’s contribution to the conversation. We were happy with our technical skills and technologies, but more importantly we have jelled as a team, or made it through the Norming phase of Tuckman’s model. Characteristically, my team identified our successes but did not dwell on them as much as our areas for improvement. We decided we might use the gathered data to satisfy the lacked or longed for items. We posted the following collective discoveries prominently in our team room:

  • Iteration
  • Continuous Planning
  • Continuous Research
  • Communication
  • Feedback (outside the walls)

These needs resonate with some of the Agile Manifesto principles:

  • Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.
  • Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
  • The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
  • Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
  • At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

In our efforts to optimize our agility, we are learning from our team’s past and planning for the future so that our results could be real good.

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