Working Effectively with Legacy Code originally started as a book about Test First Programming but morphed into a book about the techniques for refactoring code in legacy systems
The Pinned Progress Curve – for many people there is no incentive to change so the mean gets larger between the status quo and good practices
Organisations that have technical founders have a very different character to their work internally, need to make knowledge of the quality of software more pervasive – the business need to understand more about the technical side, and the developers need to understand more about the business
Code that has excessive error handling typically has other design problems – benefit in thinking about whether…
Craig is at YOW! Conference and catches up with Anne-Marie Charrett who is well known in the testing community as a trainer, coach and consultant but also for her support of the community:
Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory talk about how they came to collaborate on the “Agile Testing” books, the testing skillset and approaches to learning, and new and interesting approaches to testing.
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)
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).
value of quality is lower than the price of quality – quality is dead
you may get a quality product (sometimes) but you always get an expensive product
quality matters for human life, security and money
systems are designed for redundancy these days so most of the time nothing will go wrong
people value free over quality
we live in a world where quality doesn’t matter, we are used to things failing
restructure what you are doing – don’t focus on catching big bugs, but focus on productivity testing, reduce the cost of development and speed it up
it is cheaper to fix a bug when the customer finds it now we are moving to the cloud
organisations are now paying people to find security bugs, people will test for free for a free device, some companies will offer jobs if you find a bug
need to start communicating value of work in a language people understand – how much did we save?
Test Process Improvement: Testers Get Out Of Your Cave!
TMMi has 5 levels – initial > managed > defined > management and measurement > optimization
start at level 2 when assessing
results from some TMMi quick scan assessments in 20 organisations – test reporting 30%, test planning 41%, test monitoring 47%, test design 60%, test environment 59%
test design is probably high because it can be influenced within the testing team, whereas planning and reporting, etc.. require people outside of your team
testing teams are in a cave, need to get out of the cave and use the rest of the organisation
stakeholder definition – the most important people at the BBQ – the hold the power, they have mindset and ambition
it’s all political – politics is a way of life – you need to get in front of the leaders and stakeholders and have political skills
Why Model-Driven Testing is of Great Relevance to Test Managers and Test Analysts
Thomas Hadorn from Tricentis gave this very vendor driven presentation.
My presentation from Agile 2011 that I delivered with Adrian Smith called “The Speed To Cool: Agile Testing and Building Quality In” is available on Slideshare.
Ensuring that the approach to testing and quality is understood and appropriately valued in an agile world can be a struggle for many organisations, especially when resources are limited and our customers are expecting business value in a timely manner. In this session we will define what quality means and share a number of tools for measuring it, discuss approaches to improving the skills, empowerment and role of testing in the organisation and share why testing is the coolest role on the team and why it is everyones responsibility.
Some of the comments on Twitter included:
@BrianGress: We tend to test only what we can see. #agile2011 @adrianlsmith
@tonyrockyhorror: @smithcdau Speed to Cool was best talk I’ve seen all week. It will take a mighty effort to top it. #agile2011
Craig is at Agile 2017 in Orlando, Florida and speaks with David Bernstein, author of “Beyond Legacy Code“, and they chat about agile technical practices:
Craig Smith 
You must be logged in to post a comment.