The Shaolin of testing

My  last 2 gigs were a bit different to the usual ones from a team composition point of view. The bit that was different was that there weren't any Business Analysts on the team. My initial concerns were who would gather requirements? Who would analyse stories? Who would negotiate scope with the business? Who would be involved in Scope Management? Who would be our proxy customer? The above questions got me concerned, but it wasn't as bad as i thought it to be. The customer was co-located with the team and we had easy access to validate our understanding on business rules, scope, sign-offs etc. Our team composed of an IM, Devs and Testers. The IM was managing scope with the customer and getting the priorities. The team would then sit with the business to understand what the requirements were and we would create Epics and then further break them down into smaller chunks of workable stories. A thing to note here is that all roles would put their BA hat on and identify gaps if...

A typical story card wall on most Agile projects would have the following lanes Ready for Development In Development Ready for QA In QA Ready for Customer Sign-off Done Having this lane structure gives the impression of the team working in silos. It feels like the developers work on developing the story and hand over an artifact to the QAs to now go and test and then whatever happens after that is their (QAs) problem. In my previous projects, we have tried to combine the In Development, Ready for QA and In QA lanes to one "In-Progress" lane. The benefits of doing this were The responsibility to move a story to done was now owned by the team and not a specific role. Developers, Business Analysts would help with testing if testing was a bottleneck. We could set Work in-progress limits, so as to implement a pull model, where only as much work is done as can be consumed. This approach helped the team manage the flow of stories across to Done in a more sustaina...

We all know the value a tester brings to projects and the industry is now finally valuing testers as equals to developers. However, one thing that is often a debate is the input or role a tester has on automated testing. Testers can have a major influence in automated testing without having to write all tests on their own. In my company, testers are expected to be technical and be able to write automated tests on their own. In fact the expectation is to create the Automation Framework too. I am not a fan of testers creating automation frameworks or writing automated tests on their own. I would prefer for testers to pair with developers on any automated testing activity, be it the framework or writing automated tests. Testers understand the application backwards and they are the best candidates to identify what should be tested. Now, by collaborating with the developers, both can make an informed decision as to what can be tested and at what level. For e.g. Some tests are worth wri...

Over the past few years, I have tried to justify the use of a BDD (Behavioral Driven Development)  framework to express my tests, but not once have been able to say BDD has helped me address a  problem which writing tests the non BDD way would not have addressed. I do understand the value BDD brings to the table, but in most projects that I have implemented BDD on, we have tried to provide a solution (BDD) to a problem that does not exist. Let me try and explain. Lets look at the key benefits of expressing tests the BDD way (There could be more) Collaboration between Business and Development Ubiquitous Domain Language Focus on the behavior of the application Now, more often than not unless your business is co-located with the team, collaboration is not the easiest. The value BDD brings here, is the business validating our understanding by reading our tests expressed in the Given When Then format (BDD) and providing feedback, as BDD expresses the behavior of the syst...