Agile Testing with Lisa Crispin

I’ve been driving donkey-drawn carts for five years or more. The donkeys and I are pretty good at it. Ernest was obstacle-driving champion five years in a row at the Castle Rock Mule and Donkey Show. Ernest and Chester have won several Feed Team races (Mini class).

Recently we upgraded to a wagon. This is a miniature buckboard with a fifth wheel. The wheelbase is about 8 feet, and the tongue another 8 feet. As the driver, I perch WAY up on a seat, far from the donkey team. Look how far away I am.

Wagon Team

The first time I took encouraged the donkeys to some speed pulling this wagon, they started to lope, and then I could tell they were not exactly under my control anymore. I flashed back to those runaway stagecoach scenes in old Westerns. Not a good feeling.

Luckily, we have an awesome donkey driving trainer, Tom Mowery. Tom suggested that I sit WAY forward on that seat, leaning over the front of the wagon, taking a short hold on the lines (what would be reins, if we were riding instead of driving). This way, I could react quickly if they got out of control. OH – a short feedback loop!

I practiced getting the donkeys to lope, then bringing them back to a trot – all while in this aggressive position hanging over the front of the cart with short lines. We practiced getting into a lope, and coming right back to a trot. With immediate feedback, the donkeys (they are SO smart) figured out that the wagon wasn’t a scary thing chasing them, that they were actually controlling its speed, and they could slow it down on command.The short feedback loop let them fix the problems right away without any panic.

Short feedback loops work the same way with software teams. If we have a continuous integration process that runs our regression tests on each new version of the code, we know within a few minutes or hours whether new or updated code has broken something. When we know right away, it’s easy to fix. Problems don’t worry us, because we know we can fix them in a timely manner and move on.

Short feedback loops give us confidence. Confidence leads to enjoyment. I love driving my donkeys, and I love working on a software development team that is guided by continual quick feedback! Look how much fun this is!

An Agile Team!

I was an early adopter of the terrific Agile in a Flash cards by Jeff Langr and Tim Ottinger, but left in the dust in the new fashion of having one’s photo taken with the card deck! I have remedied that situation with help from my friend Anna Blake, who was my photo shoot Art Director and photographer. We got up bright and early today on a cold Colorado morning, put on our Carrharts and Elmer Fudd hats, and showed the cards to the donkeys and goats.

Jo, Edgar and Chester are keen to get up to speed on Agile

Ernest is the cautious late adopter, but he is moving in for more

In my experience, the bond between humans and work animals and how it affects their teamwork shares much in common with the bond between human teammates. Therefore, I recommend this article by my friend and Feldenkrais practitioner Pam Beets about the ‘functional integration’ lesson she gave to me and my donkey Chester. Communicating with intelligence, sentience and our nervous systems is integral to human teams too!

The new issue of Agile Record has an article of mine, one I’ve been wanting to write for a long time. It’s not the best-crafted article I ever wrote – I was in a rush to make the deadline (actually I missed the deadline, but the editors were nice and included my article anyway). However, it’s an article that’s close to my heart.

Lisa and Chester

If you’ve ever heard me speak, you’ve probably heard me refer to my donkeys as an example of the importance of trust, or enjoyment of work. I wanted to explain all the insights I’ve gained from my donkeys and applied to agile software development, and I finally sat down and wrote this article. Please enjoy it, and let me know what you think.

My Agile Testing Days tutorial is almost full, so my motivation here is not to advertise it, but to invite you to meet one of my donkeys, Ernest. I tried to make the video with both Ernest and Chester, but it was very windy outdoors that day and Chester was fidgety, we couldn’t get a good video. My friend Anna suggested taking Ernest indoors to do the video, so we went in the living room and it worked just fine. It’s short, please enjoy!