When Craig Smith and I were planning our presentation for Agile 2011 – we toyed with the idea of listing 7 anti-patterns for automated testing. I’ve taken these patterns and loosely matched them to the classic seven-deadly-sins. This metaphor also allowed me to include a linocut that my uncle Errol Smith made – pictured here.
Senior management often view automated testing as a silver bullet in reducing testing effort/costs and increasing delivery speed. While it is true that automated tests can provide rapid feedback on health of the system, all approaches to automated testing are not created equal and there are some gotchas that should be avoided.
Large scale construction projects suffer from cost and time overruns that are typically a symptom of productivity problems and directly affect overall industry profitability. As a result, methodologies have been developed to reduce the risk of overruns and improve project outcomes. Read the rest of this entry »
Craig Smith and I be presented at STANZ 2011 on The Future Tester at Suncorp: A Journey of Building Quality In Through Agile in Melbourne, Australia. Our presentation was based around work that we have been doing at Suncorp to improve testing capability, skills and approaches. We also included some of the work we’ve done at Ennova on Agile Test Strategies. Read the rest of this entry »
Craig Smith and I presented a session called Accelerating the Speed To Cool On The Road To Building Quality In at Agile2011 in Salt Lake City. The talk was based around work that we have been doing at Suncorp to improve testing capability, skills and approaches. We also included some of the work we’ve done at Ennova on Agile Test Strategies. Read the rest of this entry »
Startup businesses face significant risk in the search for a sustainable, profitable and scalable business model. Consequently, the success rate for Startups is low, making them a typically high risk investment. Agile methods offer a way of reducing the risk for both the technical implementation and the development of customers. This is achieved by increasing the ability for a Startup to adapt to change and to incorporate the lessons learned from early customer engagement. Read the rest of this entry »
Recently I helped facilitate a workshop with a major engineering company focusing on the use of Work Packages to manage the execution of industrial construction projects. Part of the workshop included a team exercise that compared the efficiency of teams working with and without Work Packages.
I discussed some of the Agile principles and practices relevant to a startup and demonstrated some of the tools used by Ennova. Despite numerous technical issues (which rendered the video unusable) the content stimulated heaps of questions.
Gregory Wilson published an article in the American Scientist discussing the results from a web-based survey of how scientists use computers. Its worth a reading as it highlights the differences between the the scientific community and the IT industry. For me, the most important were collaboration, team work and reuse.
In many organisations (especially larger commercial or government) it is common for the project governance processes to require an estimate of project costs before funds can be released and the project launched. Therefore, it is necessary to develop an estimate that can be used as the basis of a go/no-go decision.
In the example discussed below, I was asked to create a process for developing an estimate that satisfied the above requirements. Rather than simply creating process flow and swim-lane diagrams, I tried to consider how the process could be adapted and matured over time as the organisation changed over time. In doing so I found the many agile/lean principles were being subtly introduced. Read the rest of this entry »
