Non-Functional-Requirements (NFR) and Scrum

I recorded a small webcast to visualize how I like to work with NFR with Scrum!

Enjoy,
Ralph
effective agile.

Retrospective Activity; I do not settle with only one

I have been running retrospective activities for a long time. I really like retrospective activities.

Interesting enough, I have not married with one activity. I try new activities. I brag to my friends about the latest one. Many times I repeat old ones. But I do not settle with only one.

 I look around. And I find people that also like many retrospective activities. I also find people that did  settle with one activity (well / less well seems to be the most married type).  They seem happy with the the same routine.

For the ones who like varying retrospective activities, check out the Agile Retro Activities catalog.

Agile Testing Days 2012 - Take Away

Last week I’ve attended the Agile Testing Days 2012 Conference in Potsdam, Germany. It has been a great conference with great talks from various well known thought leaders. I for myself was invited to talk about  'Sprint Backlog in ATDD’.

Every conference has its take away the one thing you take home nagging your mind. For me it was the talk from Gojko ‘Reinventing Software Quality’.

Here my current take away:

1. Measurement

We/business usually measure the wrong thing. In his example he took his book 'Specification by Example’. In the print he found over 20 P1 bugs like sentence cut off, over 70 P2 bugs and so on. So he was very upset with the printing house which allowed the bad quality. However, in the end it has a five star review at Amazon. The errors did not matter as the final product still provided excellent value to the end user. His understanding of quality was different then the readers ones.  

(source: amazon.com)

2. The third Wheel

Gojko’s lesson learned was that we should aim to create the right high quality product but that this is only the beginning. With the two wheels of Sprints and Daily work we only address our internal point of view. We need to make sure that we have delighted customers who are willing to pay for our product and like to use it. 

Therefore we need to add a third wheel powering the other two - the business measuring the satisfaction of the end user.

In my opinion, this is were we will see a future connection between requirements engineering and idea behind ‘The Lean Startup’ of  Eric Ries.

This is also in alignment with the quote (can’t remember the exact words) from Jim Highsmith where he challenges business: If you want us (development) to measure our productivity you (business) need to measure the benefit for the company. 

(source: Gojko Adzic)

3. Agile Testing Quadrants

I am a big fan of the Agile Testing Quadrants which were first described by Brian Marick in 2003 and became famous through the ‘Agile Testing’ book of Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory. 

The quadrants Q3 and Q4 which are described as to ‘Critique the Product’ are in Gojkos mind wrong as they are still in house before the product hits the market. Essentially we test our process and not the product. We test the adherence to the agile requirements, not how satisfied our customers are. In this regard it should be renamed ‘Critique Process’.

(source: Brian Marick)

How could we then integrate the ‘Critique Product’ testing? I had a great talk with Janet Gregory about how this could be visualized but there is nothing firm yet. We talked about various add-ons and shapes. 

Final thought

For me the circle from Agile to Business and Business to Agile is slowly starting to close - the time to merge management and development has the chance of becoming reality.

I for myself, will dive straight into learning and using Impact Mapping ....

an awesome presentation on usability testing

Usability Testing Intro from Erica Burnett

A really cool presentation on retrospectives

Guilherme Lacerda gave a really good presentation on retrospective at Agiles 2012.

The Power of Retrospectives from FACENSA, UniRitter, Wildtech

It has some really cool activities, and great references. I will definitely add some of it to the Agile RetrospectiveActivities blog.

AgileDay at Porto Alegre

Porto Alegre has an amazing Agile community. Many of the Agile people in Brazil live in this city.

The GUMA AgileDay is a clear indication of this high concentration of Agilistas.

Tomorrow, 200 hundred people will get together to talk about Agile. Many of hte sessions are a replay of the AgileBrazil 2012 sessions.

Gladly, tomorrow I will be joining the presenters and will repeat the workshop on Agile RetrospectiveActivities.

 

Checklist: the Story is Ready for Development

Here is a simple check list for verifying a Story is ready for development. 

• I have considered the high level design change for this story
• I know the code area which need to be modified / created for this story
• I have thought and considered the flow changes introduced by this story
• I have looked at the existing test automation for the current flow/behavior (as is)
• I have thought and described how I will validate the flow/behavior changes introduced by this story (to be)
• I understood all the current acceptance criteria (ACs) for this Story
• I am happy with the current ACs for this Story  (I don’t see the need to create a new or remove any of the ACs for thÌs story)
• I thought about it, and I believe this story should not be split into smaller pieces
• I thought about it, and I believe this story should not be merged with another one

A missing checked item will trigger a Story huddle, and the story will not be considered ready for development.