Duncan Nisbet - Software Delivery Consultant
Bespoke Agile & Testing Training
I’ve just finished up a role as an Agile Coach in an eCommerce enterprise helping their Financial Services teams adopt a more iterative approach to value delivery.
Before that, I was embedded in one of their development teams as an Agile Tester.
This post is a summary of our adventures as developers building relationships with our colleagues in Financial Services….
As with many thousand others, I find myself out of work as my customers adapt to this unprecedented pandemic.
So, yes I am looking for work but I’m not stressing about it (yet…)
Back in October 2018, I shared a post about my attempts to create a Top Trumps deck of cards celebrating influential women throughout our history.
The development of the physical cards has come to a halt and I thought that was it, that was until I was put onto no/low code development platforms. These have blown my world wide open!
This post is about how I’ve taken my Wonderful Women Top Trumps digital with Glide - a no-code platform for building apps consuming data from Google Sheets.
Several projects I am working on within my organisation are adopting SAFe in order to build software solutions, so I thought I should perform some SAFe testing!
With my Agile background, I am able to provide a lot of value in helping the teams follow an iterative development lifecycle (predominantly Scrum), but I have little experience of processes outside of the development teams themselves.
I also seem to struggle to get my message across to senior stakeholders within my organisation who are new to Agile & SAFe.
My hypothesis is that achieving the Leading SAFe Certification will help me
This post aims to outline what happened in the experiment…
It seems I have been living under a rock when it comes to what appears to be a fundamental tool in DJing (a side hobby of mine)
It’s called Harmonic Mixing which is the implementation of the Circle of fifths found in music theory.
This post is about my first foray into harmonic mixing & how I can improve my DJing by incorporating the skills into my toolbox.
Continue reading “Experiments in Harmonic Mixing #1 - Round The Clock”
Back in May, I sat & successfully completed the BBST Bug Advocacy class from the Association for Software Testing.
Cucumber is not a testing tool. I know this.
One of the big noises I make about Cucumber is that it is not a testing tool, it is a tool to help collaboration, discussion of requirements & generate living documentation.
How then did I fall into the trap of trying to use Cucumber as an automated testing tool?
And finally we come to the end of this exploration into the Testing Matrix, so what have I learned?
Continue reading “Dissecting The Testing Quadrants – Wrap Up”
This post outlines some examples of how I’m currently using our current incarnation of the test matrix
Continue reading “Dissecting The Testing Quadrants – Some Examples”
Whilst digging into the test matrix / agile quadrants, I’ve come across several different representations of the model.
This post is a collection of some of those representations (in chronological order as far as I can tell).
Continue reading “Dissecting The Testing Quadrants - Different Representations”
I have just finished some fantastic Ruby & Cucumber training with the most affable Chris Parsons.
There are some definite lessons to be learned (other than writing Cukes with Ruby)…
This is the 3rd in a series of posts where I dig into the Agile Testing Quadrants after a coaching session I had with James Bach. This post focuses on the left & right sides of the matrix; the columns.
Continue reading “Dissecting The Testing Quadrants - Columns”
In our team, I noticed the way we were speaking & the words we were using sounded as if we were trying to influence others of our thoughts & ideas.
Sometimes this made me feel uncomfortable, especially when the recipient didn’t realise they were being influenced (or didn’t know what to do about it) & consequently their opinion was altered as a result of the language used, not merely the content.
(Parental Advisory - explicit content)
This is the first post attempting to document some of the conversation James Bach & I had whilst trying to determine what my understanding of the Agile test quadrants actually was.
This post is a WIP as I’m sure I’ll be updating it as I walk through each of the quadrants & work with some of the different ideas & terminology we discussed.
Continue reading “Dissecting The Testing Quadrants - Rectangles”
So a change in family circumstances has me available for a new role sooner than I was expecting. This a short post about how I might be able to help with your testing needs.
I’m a fan of the (Agile) Testing Quadrants, first described by Brian Marick back in 2003 as a matrix & later popularised by Lisa Crispin & Janet Gregory.
James Bach helped me to break down the quadrants in order to get a deeper understanding of what each quadrant meant. It was during this conversation I realised I had a very shallow understanding of the model & I was effectively diluting (& even twisting?!) the message the quadrants were trying to get across.
This post is WIP & under iterative development!
At my current client, we’re being coached in the Hexagonal Architecture pattern.
Admittedly, the primary focus is towards the Programmers, but the change in the development strategy has an impact on us Testers so we get a seat a table.
What is this change in the development strategy which will impact us Testers? The pattern considers integration tests as brittle & unneccessarily linking the business logic to the implementation. As such, with this pattern, you want as few integration tests as possible. So the question is:
As a Tester, how confident am I that the removal of (automated) integration tests have not decreased the stability of the code?
In this 3 part series, I hope to learn more about hexagonal architecture, what it does for the teams test strategy & what the impact is for Testers.
Continue reading “Hexagonal Architecture For Testers: Part 1”
As you may be aware, I follow certain testing folks in the Context Driven community. Some of these Testers are members of the Miagi-Do School of Software Testing.
I have read & heard about this Miagi-Do school for a while - I knew I had to complete a challenge to ‘gain entry’ in order to prove my worth, but I had never got round to following up on how I go about receiving a challenge.
Now, largely due to a post from David Greenlees, I got my ass into gear & contacted the Miagi-Do school for a challenge!
Continue reading “Miagi-Do challenge from Matt Heusser - Critical Thinking”
What better way to guage your learning than to have a chat with someone who knows (& has proved they know!) what they’re talking about.
This was the tone of the Skype coaching session I was fortunate to have with Anne-Marie Charret (AM) the other week (apologies in getting round to blog about it!)
Continue reading “Skype Coaching with Anne-Marie Charret - Critical Thinking”
2012 has been manic for me so I haven’t been able to blog as much I’d like to. That doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking of ideas.
These ideas have been racking up, so I thought I’d bang them into a post so I don’t forget. Also, writing them down means I’m committed to seeing them through!
