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The Forgotten Agile Principles

I recently watched a great TED talk from Simon Sinek titled “How great leaders inspire action”

The main point that Simon makes in the talk is:

“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it”

He was coming from a marketing perspective, but the talk resonated for me because of its application to “Agile”.

The majority of this post focuses on Simons model “The Golden Circle”. The second part of the talk moves on to the “Law of diffusion of innovation” which I don’t cover here. For a testing focus on on law of diffusion of innovation, I’ll refer you to Johanna Rothman’s Lets Test 2013 keynote “How to be a Kick Ass Manager“.

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The Cost Of Certification And Professional Exlusion

There’s been a fair amount of chatter recently regarding certifications & whether they’re good, bad or actually provide any value.

I’ve been looking at them from a different perspective - As a self employed Tester, if I can’t afford the certification & any related training costs then I am immediately excluded from roles at companies where the certification is mandatory.

It’s not that I’m not good enough to do the role, its the fact I can’t afford it.

will-test-for-food

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Let’s Taste - The Retrospective

Here we go then with the dissection of my “Lets Taste” session at Let’s Test 2013. After reading the great post from Aleksis where he applies 6 Hats Thinking to attending Let’s Test, I’m going to try & use the same technique for retrospecting on my session.

This retrospective also includes valuable feedback I received from Paul Holland, Fiona Charles, Iain McCowatt, Carsten Feilberg & John Stevenson- thank you all.

thinking-cap

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Hexagonal Architecture For Testers: Part 2

This post is WIP & under iterative development!

This is part 2 of my mini series of posts on the hexagonal architecture pattern, its testing strategy & the impact on Testers.

The first post was an attempt to explain hexagonal architecture in a language I understand.

This post is focussed on the testing strategy associated with hexagonal architecture.

wellington-broken-pyramid
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Test Automation Basics - Levels, Pyramids & Quadrants

This post started life in my series on hexagonal architecture, but it got too unwieldy & not directly related to the topic so here it is in all its own glory.

This post is now a brief introduction to my understanding of test automation, the test automation pyramid & testing quadrants and is used as a reference for the hexagonal architecture series.

James Crisp Test Pyramid

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Hexagonal Architecture For Testers: Part 1

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.

table & chairs representing hexagonal architecture
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Miagi-Do challenge from Matt Heusser - Critical Thinking

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!
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