Agile Testing Training with Lisa Crisping and Janet Gregory
This three day Agile Testing course explains how testers can become valued agile team members, how they contribute to delivering a continuous stream of business value, and ways to overcome common cultural and logistical obstacles in transitioning to an agile development process. It describes the values and principles that help testers adopt an agile testing mindset, and gives practical alternatives to traditional testing processes, such as defect tracking, metrics, audits, and conforming to quality models. Students will be shown how to complete testing activities in short iterations, and how testers contribute on a daily basis during each iteration and release cycle. Through interactive exercises and group discussions, participants will discover good strategies for driving development with both executable and manual tests. The course is filled with real–life examples of the many ways agile testers add value.
Learn how to:
Understand how testers contribute on agile teams, how agile teams successfully cover all dimensions of software quality in short release cycles, and collaborate to deliver the "right" business value at frequent, consistent intervals.
Prerequisites:
The course is aimed at testers experienced in traditional phased and gated software development methodologies that found themselves on an agile project. It is also aimed at testers on agile projects wanting to improve their skills and contribute better to the whole team. Testing⁄QA managers, and development managers who work with testers, will also find the course valuable.
Program:
Each module includes small group exercises and discussions in addition to the 2 major exercises listed.
Day One
Introduction into Agile and How Testing Fits
– Overview of agile terminology
- Agile Methods – what does it mean to a tester
– SDLC – Introduce agile testing activities and approach
- compare it to phased & gated
- What problems are we trying to solve?
- Communication
Adapting to Agile
– The whole–team approach
- Ten Principles for agile testers
- Roles and responsibilities
- Learning to collaborate
– Overcoming common obstacles
- Cultural Issues
- Mini–waterfalls
– Transitioning typical processes
- Defect tracking
- Quality models
- Traceability
Release Planning
– Sizing and prioritizing stories
– Visibility
DAY 2
– Exercise: Release planning simulation
Test Planning
– Automation Needs
- Value of automation
- Common obstacles
- Evaluating Tools
– Using the Agile Testing Quadrants
- Vocabulary, Collaboration
- Tests that guide development, foundation for quality
- Tests to evaluate the product
– The Agile Testing Pyramid
– Test Plan Alternates
DAY 3
The Iteration
– Pre–planning explanation
– Iteration Planning
Simplest thing first – steel thread
- Acceptance Tests – give an example using same story
- Task breakdown, and estimating
- Visibility
- What to automate
– Coding & Testing
- Defect tracking
- Expanding tests
- Exploratory testing
– The demo
– Exercise – We will work through an iteration simulation so that the students will have an opportunity to experience all we have talked about.
Successful Delivery
– The End Game
– Release retrospective
Key Success Factors
– Summary: Seven Key Success Factors for Agile Testing
Team Mentoring Services
This agile testing course will have a much greater impact on the project if it is followed up with mentoring, to help team members anchor it in their own work, and to help them over the practical obstacles that frustrate, and frequently stop, people doing these things for the first time. Valuable new ideas fail to take hold for lack of some practical detail.
About the trainers:
Lisa Crispin is an agile testing coach and practitioner. She is the co–author, with Janet Gregory, of Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams. She specializes in showing testers and agile teams how testers can add value and how to guide development with business–facing tests. Her mission is to bring agile joy to the software testing world and testing joy to the agile development world. Lisa joined her first agile team in 2000, having enjoyed many years working as a programmer, analyst, tester, and QA director. Since 2003, she has been a tester on a Scrum⁄XP team at ePlan Services, Inc. She frequently leads tutorials and workshops on agile testing at conferences in North America and Europe. Lisa regularly contributes articles about agile testing to publications such as Better Software magazine, IEEE Software, and Methods and Tools. Lisa also co–authored Testing Extreme Programming with Tip House.
Janet Gregory is Based in Calgary, Alberta, she specializes in helping teams build quality system, and her greatest passion is promoting agile quality processes. Over the past ten years, she has helped to introduce development agile practices into companies as tester or coach, and has successfully transitioned several traditional test teams into the agile world. Her focus is working with the business users and testers to understand their role in agile projects. She has partnered with developers on her agile teams to implement successful test automation solutions.
Janet is a frequent speaker at agile and testing software conferences in North America and Europe. She’s a regular contributor to the North American agile testing community.
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