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Agile Testing a Financial Services project in an eCommerce site

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….

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I am Tester, I am Developer

One of the biggest challenges I typically face when joining a development team is understanding the silo between programmers & testers (& other team members).

I approach this challenge by referring to both roles with the generic term of “Developer”, whilst using “Programmer” & “Tester” to differentiate between the roles when required.

I use the term “Developer” as we are both helping to develop software. I believe I got the analogy of eating from Michael Bolton - you can’t keep stuffing food in your mouth (programming) without swallowing (testing). 

This post builds on that idea to share how I use the fire triangle as a metaphor for activities & roles that play a part in software development.

Image showing the 3 elements of the fire triangle - oxygen, heat & Fuel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_triangle
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Testing The Leading SAFe Certification

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

  1. with the process knowledge gap
  2. improve my communication with senior stakeholders

This post aims to outline what happened in the experiment…

Question-4-Level-SAFe-Big-Picture-4.0

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Single Source Of Truth Is A Lie

This is the 2nd post in my series on Truth. It builds on the first post by hopefully demonstrating how my opinions on truth & “Living Documentation” have changed after some research into what is truth.

This research was done in preparation for the fabulous MEWT conference. Here is a link for the slides of my “Single Source Of Truth Is A Lie” talk - this post aims to follow the structure of that talk.

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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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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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Testing The Time Machine - Lessons Learned / Retrospective

This post is about using the output from my Testing The Time Machine dojo to help me develop my exploratory testing, presentation & facilitating skills.

The previous post includes what I learnt from the session generally, in terms of organising a geek night & presenting. This post is about what I have learnt from the session output combined with the previous post in order to identify clear goals for my continued exploratory testing learning as well as improving the dojo.

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