Tag: Soapbox

Do not become a bottleneck for the agile project

Last November, during the EuroSTAR conference, I was asked to give a soapbox speech in the grand hall. During this “lightning strikes the keynotes” session I stated that if we testers don’t make haste with our test improvements we’ll become the agile project’s bottleneck.

I made a short summary of my arguments in the video below. In my latest edition of G(r)ood Testing 19: Let’s make haste with our test improvements I repeat this message, and also indicate some items that require attention in many organisations. You can read the column and my other columns in the series on the EuroSTAR community pages.

 

The Full Circle: What to do with our “old school” test experience

Bob van de Burgt made a nice video of the SoapBox presentation I gave on the 2014 EuroSTAR conference. In this 5 minute message I state that the testers’ world gets extremely diverse. Not only are there many disciplines within testing, we also collaborate more and more with other disciplines like business analysts, programmers, Maintenance and Users. Additionally when implementing agile I experience that People and Cultural aspects are the key succes factors of implementing the required changes. So Collaboration is key, because with this magnitude of diversity no man can be a know-all.

We need to be aware that many younger IT-ers do not have the back-ground that experienced tester have. Since failing forward and learning is a key aspect of agile, we seem te be tempted to throw away the “old” knowledge, and start our own learn cycle. Here lies a responsibility for the experienced testers. I state in this message that they should coach, guide the less experienced team members. Share the rich knowledge that is available about testing and helping to make it applicable in order to contribute to valuable quality software.

Note: the Column I refer to in the video can be read here (sorry only in dutch): Samen + werken= Een Streepje Voor Hebben.

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