distributed agile testing: yes, you can

TP PM Tutorial

4/30/13 1:00PM

Distributed Agile Testing:

Yes, You Can

Presented by:

Janet Gregory

DragonFire, Inc.

Brought to you by:

340 Corporate Way, Suite 300, Orange Park, FL 32073

888-268-8770 ∙ 904-278-0524 ∙ sqeinfo@sqe.com ∙ www.sqe.com

Janet Gregory

Agile testing coach and practitioner Janet Gregory (@janetgregoryca) is the coauthor of Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams and a contributor to 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know. Janet specializes in showing agile teams how testers can add value in areas beyond critiquing the product. For the past ten years, she has been working with teams to transition to agile development. Janet teaches agile testing courses and tutorials worldwide, contributes articles to leading publications, and enjoys sharing her experiences at conferences and user group meetings worldwide. Find more information at janetgregory.ca or visit her blog.

13/03/2013

StarEast 2013

Orlando, Florida

With input from Lisa Crispin

DragonFire Inc.

My experience comes …

As a tester, working on co-located agile teams,

several distributed teams

Coached interviewed distributed teams world wide

Twitter: @janetgregoryca

janet@agiletester.ca

www.janetgregory.ca

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DragonFire Inc. 3

DragonFire Inc.

Let’s learn a bit about your experiences

- Different cities, same time zone (or 1 hr. apart)

- Time zones more than 3 hrs difference

- More than 7 hrs difference

- More than one continent

- More than 3 remote teams

- Others?

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What are your issues with distributed teams?

Don’t forget to consider testing issues…

15 - 20 minutes to capture issues

Then debrief & share

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• Cost savings

• Mergers & acquisitions

• Remote availability

• Lack of expertise

in-house

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• Able to hire the ‘right’ people

◦ Independent of where they live

• Leverage time zones to your advantage

◦ Shorten feedback cycle

• More diversity

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• Extra communication efforts

• Time zone differences

• Dependencies

• Less productive

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Instead of saying NO,

or being the gatekeeper

Be the information provider so

business can make the decisions

Questions… on limitations / benefits?

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Distributed teams means cultural issues. Many teams just don’t take it into consideration.

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Norms & valuesLanguage

Infrastructure challenges

History, habitsInteractions

• Accents

• English as a second language

• Attitudes – assertive vs. reserved / humble

• Saving face

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Infrastructure Challenges

What we

think of as

“normal”,

may not be

for everyone

DragonFire Inc.

It’s relatively simple for a co-located team to

adapt to agile, make the values’ their own,

and follow the principles.

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• Lack of trust

• Lack of face time

• Splitting work between teams

• Collaboration / Communication

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• Give the benefit of the

doubt to team members

• Think constantly of

distributed teams

members

• Extend help to others

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Get entire team in one place

◦ At the start of the project

◦ Regular intervals (if possible)

• At a minimum,

individuals spend

time in other

locations

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• Divide up work

• Use time zones to your advantage

• What are some ways to do this?

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Questions… cultural & team challenges?

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• Collaboration means ...

◦Working together to find solutions, etc.

• Communication means ... sharing

◦ Ideas, information, decisions, solutions, etc.

◦ Understand the media

◦ Know the audience

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• Set up communication channels so all team

members have access to

◦ decisions made

◦ planning sessions

◦ meeting notes

• Lowest common denominator for

communication

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• Common orientation

• Off –shore teams

• Acquired teams

• New remote team members

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Let’s talk about tools & practices for

communication & collaboration 28

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• Email

◦ Broadcast, individual, follow-up on

conversations

• Photos – task boards, smart boards

• Videos

Remember .....

• Emails do not show emotions and

can be misinterpreted

DragonFire Inc.

• Telephone

• Chat rooms

• Wiki

• Collaborative automation tools

• Mind-mapping tools

• Remote pairing: VPN, Skype, instant messaging,

desktop sharing

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• Use video whenever possible

◦ Skype, Google phone, teleconferencing

• Put faces on stories and tasks

◦ Physical task boards

◦ On-line systems

◦ Use avatars

• Dedicated laptop on

wheels

• Good headsets

• Good microphones

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Anybody have any other

suggestions / stories to share

about tools they’ve used

successfully?

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Questions… on Tools?

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• Tests provide feedback

• Tests show desired behaviour

• Developers think about testability

• Testers think about the big picture

• Multiple skill sets mean better solution

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• Keep the feedback cycle short

• Remove dependencies early

Feature teams

are preferable

with all team

members

co-located

38Picture by Augusta Evangelisti, based on diagram from Elisabeth Hendrickson

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How is testing affected when you have feature

teams vs. component teams?

Let’s share

Generate some ideas about how to split work

between teams so that collaboration can happen.

The story: As Amazon marketing manager, I want

to offer free delivery options, so that customers

will buy multiple items at once.

Acceptance:

Orders of 5 or more books get free delivery

Discuss at your tables, and come up with various

examples that might make the story more clear.

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The story: As Amazon marketing manager, I want

to offer free delivery options, so that customers

will buy multiple items at once.

Acceptance:

Orders of 5 or more books get free delivery

exchange the examples with another table.

• Do you think that this might work with a remote

• Would it help clarify what was wanted?

• Power of 3

• Pairing

• Question

• Draw pictures

• Repeat verbal

conversations in

writing

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• Continuous integration

• Integrate testing and coding

• Use common tools

◦ Version control

◦ Test frameworks

◦ Defect tracking

Consider

operations /

maintenance

teams for

support of tests,

• Share information

• Share awareness of

dependencies

• Keep everyone “in

the loop”

• Same vision

• Same goal

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Questions… on Key Practices?

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• The right support

◦ For self-organizing teams

◦ Extra positions for liaison

• Foster a learning culture

◦ Tolerate mistakes

◦ Personal safety

• Give time to

experiment, to try

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• Schedules

◦ Overlapping times

◦ Meetings

◦ Share the pain

• Use retrospectives

◦ Identify problem areas

◦ Experiment with solutions

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• Pick one of the challenges from the first

exercise

• What experiments might you try?

• User flip charts, markers, sticky notes...

• Prepare to share top experiment with the

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Questions… on adapting?

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• Whole team

• Small chunks of work

• Use your diverse skills

• Respect culture: yours and others

• Give teams time to experiment, learn

• Maintain discipline

• Avoid silos – geographical or functional

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Think of new ways to collaborate and communicate

Remote team

member

DragonFire Inc.

Collaborate to innovate

Innovate to collaborate

Use retrospectives to improve!!

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Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for

Testers and Agile Teams

By Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory

www.agiletester.ca

Contact info

www.janetgregory.ca

http://janetgregory.blogspot.com/

Email: janet@agiletester.ca

Twitter: janetgregoryca

DragonFire Inc.

• Practices for Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Large,

Multisite and Offshore Product Development with Large-Scale

Scrum, Craig Larman and Bas Vodde, Addison-Wesley, 2010

• Agile Software Development in the Large: Diving into the

Deep, Jutta Eckstein, Dorset House, 2004

• Fearless Change: Patterns for introducing new ideas, Linda

Rising and Mary Lynn Manns

• Agile-testing@yahoogroups.com

• Pictures taken on safari in Kenya and Tanzania with Nature

Encounters Tours, British Columbia

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• www.lisacrispin.com

• Rothman Consulting Group, Inc. Vol 9, #5: Building Trust in

any Team

• Version One - State of Agile Development Survey:

http://www.versionone.com/pdf/7th-Annual-State-of-Agile-

Development-Survey.pdf

• http://leadingsoftwaretestinginanagileworld.blogspot.co.uk/2

011/03/distributed-agile-test-teams-making-it.html

distributed agile testing: yes, you can

janet gregory dragonfire

remote teams

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misinterpreted copyright

locations copyright

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coauthor of agile testing

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