Agile Testing Days 2012 – Take Away

Last week I’ve attended the Agile Testing Days 2012 Conference in Potsdam, Germany. It has been a great conference with great talks from various well known thought leaders. I for myself was invited to talk about  ‘Sprint Backlog in ATDD’.

Every conference has its take away the one thing you take home nagging your mind. For me it was the talk from Gojko ‘Reinventing Software Quality’.
Here my current take away:

1. Measurement
We/business usually measure the wrong thing. In his example he took his book ‘Specification by Example’. In the print he found over 20 P1 bugs like sentence cut off, over 70 P2 bugs and so on. So he was very upset with the printing house which allowed the bad quality. However, in the end it has a five star review at Amazon. The errors did not matter as the final product still provided excellent value to the end user. His understanding of quality was different then the readers ones.

source: amazon.com
source: amazon.com
2. The third Wheel
Gojko’s lesson learned was that we should aim to create the right high quality product but that this is only the beginning. With the two wheels of Sprints and Daily work we only address our internal point of view. We need to make sure that we have delighted customers who are willing to pay for our product and like to use it. 
Therefore we need to add a third wheel powering the other two – the business measuring the satisfaction of the end user.
In my opinion, this is were we will see a future connection between requirements engineering and idea behind ‘The Lean Startup’ of  Eric Ries.
This is also in alignment with the quote (can’t remember the exact words) from Jim Highsmith where he challenges business: If you want us (development) to measure our productivity you (business) need to measure the benefit for the company.

source: Gojko Adzic
source: Gojko Adzic

3. Agile Testing Quadrants
I am a big fan of the Agile Testing Quadrants which were first described by Brian Marick in 2003 and became famous through the ‘Agile Testing’ book of Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory. 

The quadrants Q3 and Q4 which are described as to ‘Critique the Product’ are in Gojkos mind wrong as they are still in house before the product hits the market. Essentially we test our process and not the product. We test the adherence to the agile requirements, not how satisfied our customers are. In this regard it should be renamed ‘Critique Process’.

source: Brian Marick
source: Brian Marick

How could we then integrate the ‘Critique Product’ testing? I had a great talk with Janet Gregory about how this could be visualized but there is nothing firm yet. We talked about various add-ons and shapes. 

Final thought
For me the circle from Agile to Business and Business to Agile is slowly starting to close – the time to merge management and development has the chance of becoming reality.
I for myself, will dive straight into learning and using Impact Mapping ....

About Effective Agile

Ralph Jocham is a Change Agent in Scrum // Agile // Coaching // Evidence Based Management and also a Professional Scrum Trainer based in Europe.

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