The Whole Team Approach in Practice

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I’ve just been struggling with a title for this post. Some of my ideas were: “Visibility Taken to New Heights”, “Yes, There Are Teams Who Do This Just Like In the Books”, “A Real Commitment to Continual Improvement”, “Inspiration”, but none of them really capture my amazement at what I saw visiting the team at […]

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Practice, Practice, Practice!

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The latest issue of Agile Record is out, and includes some terrific articles by Gojko Adzic, Jurgen Appelo, Ellen Gottesdiener, Johanna Rothman, Linda Rising, Catherine Powell and several more – what an incredibly talented and diverse group of contributors! My “Agile Testing in Real Life” column is about practicing our software development (that includes testing) […]

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Using Mind Maps for Test Planning

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Recently I wrote a post about how our team used a mind map to help us with theme planning. We also sometimes use mind maps to help us in planning our testing. Some people asked if I’d post an example. Here it is: We’re a financial services company, and this theme was a rewrite of […]

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Teamwork & Making Good Choices

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Agile is pretty mainstream now, but some folks still aren’t sure what testers do. In addition, the “Whole Team” approach to quality and the idea that testing and coding aren’t separate phases still mystifies some people. I think my team’s activities the past two days are a good illustration of how agile teams work together […]

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Book Review: Managing Software Debt by Chris Sterling

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When I read Earl Everett’s foreword to Managing Software Debt: Building for Inevitable Change, I knew I wanted to keep reading. He points out that “system architecture is a human activity”, and that Agile recognizes the humanness of systems development. That’s my experience, and this book affirmed that delivering valuable software frequently and consistently over […]

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