Agile Testing with Lisa Crispin

I learned about Adam Weisbart’s retrospective fortune cookies via Twitter. He kindly sent me a box of them for our team to try.

Vince and Lisa choose their cookies

We’ve been doing sprint retrospectives every two weeks for eight years, so it’s always good to get out of our rut and try something new! We each chose a cookie, and took turns reading the “fortune” inside, which was a thought-provoking question. The first question was “What could the ScrumMaster do to be more effective?” This discussion led to an idea for a new Big Visible Chart – a wall on which the SM would show the stories she and the Product Owner are preparing for upcoming sprints. We also decided to try going over requirements for each user story with not only the product owner, but the primary stakeholder for each story, which the SM will ident

Lori looks excited about her fortune

ify.

All of the “fortune” questions provoked good discussions, and ones we wouldn’t have had otherwise (we had already done our standard retrospective before digging into the fortune cookies.) For example, “How would you improve our sprint review?” Ours could certainly use improvement, but we never talk about it. I think our next sprint review will be better!

One of the questions puzzled us, “Were our Artifacts helpful for this sprint? Could we improve them? How?” We weren’t sure what “Artifacts” referred to. But the question led us into thinking of a better way to note requirements changed after coding begins, and ensure the developers are informed of all changes.

A cookie for our remote team member

The fortune cookie concept posed a challenge for Nanda, our teammate in India. We had to open his cookie and read it for him. While we were fighting over who should get to eat his cookie, the cookie got dropped and shattered on the carpet. Having fun as well as thinking of experiments to improve made the retrospective fortune cookies a big success!

Whoops!

(Thanks to my teammate Mike Thomas for taking some of these action photos with our team camera).

It’s that time of year for resolutions. One important agile principle (to me, at least) is the idea of continuosly improving. We are always looking for experiments to try, ways to work better. (There’s discussion on Twitter right now about the label ‘agile’ – maybe it’s time to drop it and just let it be the way we develop software! But that’s another post!)

Recently I wrote a Sticky Minds blog post about being nice. On New Year’s day, I read one of those newspaper articles you see every year that gives advice on sticking to resolutions. It suggested that rather than resolve to “being nicer”, set specific goals, such as, “I will compliment one of my co-workers each day on one of their accomplishments”. That seems smart.

So, instead of resolving to act nicer, I will resolve to notice and appreciate each day at least one of my teammates’ contributions. I also want to pair for some period of time with a coworker at least a couple of times a week. It would help me improve my skills, and I think it helps the team improve.

I have lots of other ways I’d like myself and my team to improve, watch this space. Meanwhile, I’m more interested in what other people are doing to improve how they work or behave. Please comment and share!