George Dinwiddie led this session which turned into a lively discussion! I had proposed what I thought was a related session on Specification By Example and had combined them, but the conversation never really had a chance of getting onto that topic!
George expects the business people to be able to read and understand the tests
non-programmers should not be writing automation, it is the programmers responsibility
wants to be able to extract working tests into a step definition rather than needing to rewrite in Ruby (George Dinwiddie)
there is a difference between a specification and testing (Christian Hassa), this is a fundamental shift
building a DSL – talk about terminology and how we explore our domain – essential step
you don’t create a DSL, you build it
not a problem with the toolset but our training in thinking in a procedural way rather than an example way of thinking (Corey Haines
testers new to automation create large scripts because it’s their only hope in creating some sort of repetition (@chzy), it does not take a lot of effort and most business people are open to working this way
enable non-programmers by getting them to come work with us every day (Woody Zuill)
George is helping people make a transition, don’t want people to throw away what they have,
ideal is not to have step definitions call step definitions, Cucumber community is becoming a community of programmers and are moving away from this
Robot Framework is more keyword driven, more aligned to non-programmers, you can also make a mess, “it is a double edged sword” (Elisabeth Hendrickson)
testers like to test the negative cases, should they be expressed at a high level or expressed as a unit test by pairing developers and testers
if you are testers and you cannot write simple Ruby scripts, then you have no place on my team (Corey Haines), this opinion is probably shared by the Cucumber community (George disagreed…)
need to use the same design patterns in both Robot and Cucumber (@chzy)
in an environment that is test centric and BDD, Cucumber is the tool (usually environments with little to no QA), in a business centric environment where you an get the business involved Robot Framework is your tool
Corey works in environments where there is very few Cucumber specifications per scenario, backed by lots of unit tests
Cucumber came out of environments where the team is predominantly developers, hence the desire to drill down to Ruby code sooner
at a large household name company – theyexpect testers to be more technical, happening more in the industry, eliminated the role of tester due to different pay grades (@chzy)
moving traditional organizations to a collaborative way of working is hard (@chzy)
wants simple refactorings that are are a bridge from one place to another (George Dinwiddie)
at a startup Joseph was at, tests were taking up to 8 hours to run and costs for distributed architecture was high
Forward Internet (London) – let developers do what they want – by not testing they could be faster and more interactive than their competitors – did testing in Production, a risk that sometimes things could fail – testing should not block deployment
in some situations it is just worth hacking it out, particularly in a lean startup
if it is faster to rewrite rather than maintain it, then don’t write tests (Fred George via Corey Haines)
a big question of this is the skill level of your developers – do you have the skill level to make the choice to not do it (Corey Haines), primary impact of success is the skill level of your developers
Scribd – were having trouble with test speed and found out the developers were scared of breaking the PDF (which is the heart of the business) – they separated the PDF out to speed up development (so developers weren’t worried about breaking it)
quick delivery – need the quick feedback cycle to make this work, simulate production
need effective tests – small suite of tests that are 5-10 minutes long
test what you are most scared of
Silicon Valley’s issue is hiring – Facebook is stealing developers from Google because they hire good people and enable them to just hack it out
2 software industries – small companies and large corporations, very different worlds
question everything – can only do this if you have experienced it before and understand it
Wikimedia Foundation – looking at ways crowd source testing to test infrastructure (rather than content) – more on this initiative to be announced in the near future
why is it any different to coding katas? Safer and smaller so you get more practice, practice collaboration too
organise a community like a book club
code roast – put the code up and everybody critiques it, be careful not to attach to a person!
We finished up the open space by writing what action we were taking from the day and giving them to another participant to keep us honest (mine was to write this post!)
This is a special mashup episode recorded in Auckland, New Zealand. Craig catches up with Mark Derricut from the Illegal Argument podcast and Craig Aspinall from the Coding By Numbers podcast. Not your usual Agile podcast, the discussion starts around the definition of Agile (“crash often, crash regulary”) and trying to define quality and ends up in a chat about wicked problems, devops and software development skillsets.
This episode has been released on the other channels as well (take a listen if you haven’t already)
Craig and Renee take a revolutionary tour of Sydney and speak to Jeremie Benazra and Dominic Franco about the Agile work that they are doing in Australia’s big city including Kanban, cultural differences, safety and edgy Agile.
Craig, Renee and Tony talk about Fed… no, Ship It! days, recent changes to Yammer and LinkedIn and the 10 agile bloggers you should know about. We also review Tony’s recent excursion to BA World and Renee’s journey to KLRAT and ponder just why Tony has such an obsession with pants…
The second keynote was supposed to be Mark “Bomber” Thompson from the Essendon Football Club but he was an unexplained no show. After an impromptu thankyou speech from me and breaking the conference for an early break, James Hird arrived to substitute and did an impromptu talk. As a result of the scheduling changes, I unfortunately did not get to see much of either session.
failed, needed twice as many people after implementation
ran net promoter scores internally, -40!
attempted Agile customer management – planning meetings took 3 hours, attendance dropped, SAP team became prioritisers
NPS dropped to about -35
changed team structure and in-sourced, positive NPS
got agile working – 4 week sprint, 40 minunte presentation, stakeholders turn up because if you are not there you don’t get prioritised
developed a prioritisation matrix – business value versus effort, colour coded cards for skillset, sets order for prioritisation
pre work is required for the meeting – know how many points of effort for every available person
prioritisation board – built the backlog as part of the session
no spreadsheets!
The Trouble With Time Machine
I was MC for this session delivered by Matthew Hodgson from Zen Ex Machina. He gets extra marks for working Doctor Who and bow tie references into the talk. His slides are available here.
time machine pattern – work an iteration or more ahead of the development team
UX is primarily about design, we are in two different worlds
embed the time machine pattern within Scrum
personas – focus on the pragmatic face of our users (David Hussman) – synthesise what we understand at the moment
added to GWT… Given I am a role AND I VALUE, When… Then…
grooming is the forgotten ceremony
involved the users in planning poker – got clear perspective in the context of their environment]
demo became a cognitive walk through
Emerging Paradigms in Software Testing
I was MC for this session for Kristan Vingrys from ThoughtWorks. I have known Kristan for a number of years, and I resonate very closely with his views on testing and testers. His slides are available here.
ATDD is a good way to break down the barriers between developers and testers
need to change focus to preventing defects rather than finding defects – measure yourself that more defects is bad
fast feedback – embrace continuous integration, automation and the test pyramid
involve everyone – crowd source your problems, tests are an asset, version control your test cases
change focus from how I prevent this going into production onto how I get this into production
build pipeline- stage build to run different tests in different stages in the pipeline
tester needs to inform the team of quality, not be responsible for quality
target testing to things that are changing, not just scatter gun
it’s about the principles, not the practices
test code is code – treat it like any other code
it’s important to know what you are not covering, more than what we are covering (Model Based Testing)
Design Eye For A Dev Guy
I was MC for this session delivered by Julian Boot from Majitek. This was one of the highlight sessions that I attended at the conference and as I remarked when thanking Julian, it reaffirmed how much I don’t know about good design. His slides are available here.
you gotta love it, you gotta be able to do it and it needs to deliver a bag load of cash
people now expect a fit and finish, design is now expected
people over process, not everyone is a good designer so let people play to their strengths as weaknesses get in the way of excellence – need to understand it though
design is related to visual processing – what we see is what we design, design can be taught
highlight individual items – contrast, colour, shape, white space, underlining
focus on data over labels – make the data bigger, keep your headings close to your data so you don’t get lost
hierarchy of actions, but use them properly
colour – use a designer, but if not use 3 colours in one shade and two others (using three grey is the best pro tip and two others)
let design be your brand, don’t overuse the brand
Agile Executive: The Naked Truth!
I was MC for this session led by Kelly Waters from ThoughtWorks and author of the All About Agile blog. I unfortunately did not get to see much of this presentation, the slides for which are available here.
I was MC for this session delivered by Tony Young from Integrated Research. This session was designated as “Expert” but there is nothing in this that I could see that made it that level. His slides are available here.
teams find it hard to focus at 7-8 people and they saw parallel development, sweet spot was 5+/- 1
changed because competitors moving faster and customers questioned our quality
used agile guidelines, not rules – had must dos and bendys
product team deliver using Scrum and give to a QA team that uses Kanban !
the peer pressure to try is key
use Lego board for backlog to see resource impacts
Other Stuff
One of my colleagues who presented a talk on day 2 was Colin McCririck (who is the Executive Manager of a team I coached for some time) and he spoke on Leadership Secrets for Agile Adoption).
Agile Australia 2012 was held a few weeks ago at the Hilton on the Park Melbourne in front of a record (and venue busting) 850 attendees. This year I had the privilege of being a plenary session host and speaker, present at two workshop sessions and be an MC at a number of different sessions.
Furthermore, I was a member of the advisory committee with the role of program overview along with the usual duties of reviewing and shepherding conference speakers. This year the review process was open to comments and voting from the community and overall I think we ended up with a good mix of proposals.
With all my duties I was quite busy this year, but here are my notes from day 1.
Keynote: When The Stakes Are High
Dr. Fiona Wood, Plastic Surgeon and Director of the WA Burns Unit, was the keynote speaker and undoubtedly for many people was the highlight of the conference. The advisory committee (and particularly Martin Kearns) had been aiming to get somebody from the medical profession for a couple of years, and her talk was nothing short of inspiring.
Following on from Dr. Fiona Wood was a tough act, but in front of 850 I took the stage with Nigel Dalton, David Joyce and Simon Bristow to deliver this session. The slides are available in a separate post.
Mainframe Test Automation Within SCRUM – How Did We At The BNZ Get It To Work?
Bram Surti and Rob White from BNZ delivered this session. Essentially I was interested to see if they did anything different to what I had already tried myself in this space. Sadly, I didn;t learn much new, but I was pleased to see they were using a lot of the same tools and approaches that I had used myself in this space. Their slides are available here.
as a leader we don’t have all the answers, but we know we can do better
Kinder Surprise in relation to people – wrapper is the actions of people, but it is a thin layer, peel off the actions you get to the attitudes that govern what we do, apply a bit of pressure and you get to the values, open up the inner canister and you get to people’s belief system
don’t really understand our belief system until you are challenged by somebody else’s – a good example of this is people and their attitudes to attending meetings – you may need to understand what drives people
there is a lot of literature around this!
transactional analysis – Games People Play (Eric Berne) and I’m OK – You’re OK (Thomas A. Harris) – at any given state we have a mental state of an adult, parent or child
child – react to world around you as if you were a child (when I grow up, I wish, I want)
parent – react like a parent based on imprints of how our parents reacted (should, ought, could)
adult (analytical side – who, what, why, I think)
even if you know yourself, you don’t know jack! – people talking on the same plane have harmonious discussions, they break down across the positions (what people know about the world)
Practical Kanban for Software Development
I was MC for this session delivered by Perryn Fowler from ThoughtWorks. I had high hopes for this talk as Kanban is still not well understood in the wder community. It covered a lot of good topics (and, as he stated at the top, the talk was the thoughts of Perryn), but it fell victim to running out of time for the meaty stuff and unfortunately was a little rushed at the end. Furthermore, his slides do not seem to be available either.
Kanban is not just cards on a wall, even though literally it is a visual indicator
Kanban is not an entire methodology, it is a technique
Kanban is a tool to tackle particular situations and problems, we often treat these situations as normal, but there is a better type of normal
limiting your WIP, the manageable level is probably a lot lower than you think
Kanban dots – stick them on your wall to indicate WIP
Kanban is about stop starting and start finishing
utilisation is not throughput, high utilisation damages throughput
Kanban is working as a team
business goal burnup – when do we start making revenue – keep your eyes on the prize
we are trying to achieve flow – Kanban will make poor flow visible
layered teams (multiple technologies) – technical layer stories don’t make sense and teams get out of synch, use task cards for the work and put WIP limit on the cards
reduce WIP to learn about your process
bugs and rework – it counts towards WIP, can put in the development or test column, whatever you are most comfortable with
blocked is nothing we as a team can do anything with – does not count towards the WIP limit
people will cheat – the rules aren’t important, it is the principles you want to achieve
use a green sticky for done rather than a done swim lane
small cards gives us good flow
Kanban will feel like it is causing problems, it is just making it visible
Value and Culture OVER Practices and Processes – Driving Agility at Bankwest
I was MC for this session delivered by Sandra Dalli and Sarah McAllister from BankWest. I really enjoyed this session. They kicked off the session with a great video with music and time lapse pictures (unfortunately it does not seem to be available publicly). Most enjoyable was their honesty about their journey and this mistakes they made along the way (they started by spending three months in a cubicle writing a document about Agile!). It also appears that their slides are not available currently.
systematic desensitisation – common technique for getting rid of fear
we always plan to succeed, so we don’t plan for failure
failure is a really great learning tool – if you made the failure you know it, the hard part is sharing with the team
taking fear of failure to the brink that you don’t know what to do is really bad
retrospectives give you a coping mechanism – share with others and make it better
continuous integration – fail early and stop the line
automated testing – removes doubt, they fail for a good reason
showcases – we find out we are going to fail early
sustainable pace – a failure because we still get a crunch at the end of the project, allows us to build slack because you can’t run at 100%
it’s about learning not winning
continuous delivery – you can go to production at any time, remove the fear of go live
aim for simplicity and feedback
fail cake – if you break something, you need to buy cake for the team, nobody is afraid of cake, nobody can yell at you with a mouthful of cake!
Safe To Fail
I was thrilled to be MC to Phil Abernathy (he was my MC last year and I have worked alongside him for a number of years). He had a great set of slides at the start of this talk to illustrate his experience. Given I knew the content of this talk quite well I did not take any notes, but I did like his analogy around the $100 strategy (for every $100 spent, where did it go – pull the strategic levers to figure out where you can change, these become your strategic programs). His slides are available here.
The night wrapped up with a student event called Activate Agile. I sat in the back of a number of presentations, with the standout for me being being an overview from Andy Sheats about their journey at health.com.au.
Renee, Craig and Ilan Goldstein talk at Agile Australia 2012 about Scrum Masters, conferences, writing a book and the state of Agile amongst other things.
Recently the Agile Academy decided to get out of running community meetups and hand them back to the community. At the same time, Adrian Smith and I had been talking about the lack of meetup groups in Brisbane. As a result, we took over the established group that existed and created the Brisbane Agile and Lean User Group.
We held our first meeting last week at the Villager Hotel who kindly sponsored the venue and some nibbles. We had about 30 attendees turn up to listen to a discussion about OpenMRS as well as having some group discussions on distributed Agile and selling Agile.
For our first meetup (under our new identity), we are going to run some lightning talks in an open space format. With a number of members having just attended Agile Australia and a long time since our last meetup, we are looking for members to share their stories.
For those that attended Agile Australia, there was a calll to action to support the OpenMRS project (http://openmrs.org/). With groups already kicked off in Melbourne and Sydney it would be great to canvas interest for a similar group in Brisbane.
If you are interested in giving a Lightning Talk please contact us and propose a topic. Alternatively, feel free to speak with us on the night as we setup the agenda.
We are also looking for suggestions on where and where to best host our meetup as well as looking for upcoming topics that the group is interested in hearing or speaking about.
After an overview of the new group and some discussion on potential upcoming topics, Michael Harrison led a discussion with Cathie Hagen on OpenMRS:
We then broke into two groups to talk about Distributed Agile:
The Agile Alliance Functional Testing Tools Workshop (AAFTT), was one again held this year the day before the Agile 2012 conference in Dallas. Despite there being only a small group there this year, the discussion was still open and free flowing under the facilitation of Matt Barcomb and the organisation of Joseph Wilk and Elisabeth Hendrickson.
Craig Smith 
You must be logged in to post a comment.