I recently finished reading Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory’s ‘More Agile Testing‘ book and it made me think about problems that I think we need to take care of at work, some of which are:

• Not enough specification by example before proceeding to coding phase. Although we do planning stages and have product owners that provide us with feature requirements written in statements, I feel that we often still don’t cover all the necessary examples required by our stories.
• Zero automated unit and integration tests on complex legacy systems. This really hurts, especially on short testing iterations, because automated end-to-end regression tests can only do so much and manual acceptance tests are just not enough to provide a high level of confidence about system quality.
• Technical debt. Rushed feature releases has left us very minimal time for refactoring sections of code that have always been a pain to develop and fix. Code reviews are usually non-existent too.
• Minimal testing visibility outside the sprint team. Programmers I work with know how I do testing – my capacity and the quality of information I provide. Other members of the team do not see as much and this causes delayed feedback, and brings in a somewhat different set of problems – only the tester knows how much testing coverage has been reached, teammates do not know how to help, among others.