You might notice that my posts here aren’t necessarily about actually doing testing activities. For the past several years I’ve been one of only three testers on a team of 25 or more coders. Currently, I’m the only tester spread across several mini-teams that add up to around 17 coders. I can’t possibly test every […]
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Retrospectives for large teams with many sub-teams
My team has 40+ members, distributed into seven or so “pods” and across several locations. It’s a challenge to communicate information among the multiple pods. In addition, we often face obstacles that cross over multiple pods. We usually have a “cross-pod retrospective” once a month. It’s typically in the “Happy/Puzzler/Sad” format. We collect items in […]
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Telling stories together while practicing critical thinking with VTS
We use our story telling and critical thinking skills constantly as we test and develop software. How often do we practice those skills on something other than features we are going to release to production? Musicians practice their craft. Even coders can practice their craft with katas and code retreats. How can we practice telling […]
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Wrapping Up Agile Testing Days 2017
Eeek, 2017 is over soon and I have one more post about the Agile Testing Days 2017 conference! Yes, it has been quite a few weeks ago now, but like most of you, the combination of work, side projects and holiday merriment have meant a lack of blogging time. I’m just going to squeak this […]
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Agile Testing Days – More Unicorns!
Day 3 of Agile Testing Days kicked off as usual with the 7 am walk/run (I walked!) to Sans Souci, followed by another excellent and well-attended Lean Coffee. This is already my third post about Agile Testing Days, so I’m going to try to stick to a few highlights! Don’t be a template zombie David […]
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Agile Testing Days, Part Deux
More memories from Agile Testing Days 2017 Another 7 am walk followed by Lean Coffee got me going for day two of the conference. One of my takeaways from Lean Coffee was from Viktorija Manevska, who started asking her team this question every day at standup: “What did you learn yesterday?” Though her team treated […]
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