1. Janet Gregory, DragonFire Inc.
Copyright 2014
SQDG – Calgary
October 2014
With input from Lisa Crispin
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DragonFire Inc.
Agile Testing - 2009
More Agile Testing
Oct. 2014
www.agiletester.ca
www.janetgregory.ca
@janetgregoryca
janet@agiletester.ca

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DragonFire Inc.
Let’s learn a bit about your experiences
-Different cities, same time zone (or 1 hr. apart)
-Time zones more than 7 hrs difference
-More than 3 remote teams
-Less than 100 people
-Larger than 1,000 employees
-Larger than 5,000
-Others?
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What are some issues implementing agile
large organizations or distributed teams?

6. •Cost savings
•Mergers & acquisitions
•Remote availability
•Lack of expertise
in-house
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•Able to hire the ‘right’ people
◦Independent of where they live
•Leverage time zones to your advantage
•More diversity

8. •Extra communication efforts
•Time zone differences
•Dependencies
•Less productive
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9. •Organizational controls
•Working with third parties
•Involving customers
•Managing dependencies
•ERP system integration
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10. Distributed teams and large organizations mean cultural issues. Many teams just don’t take it into consideration.
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DragonFire Inc.
Norms & values
Language
Infrastructure challenges
History, habits
Interactions
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DragonFire Inc.
It’s relatively simple for a co-located team to adapt to agile, make the values’ their own, and follow the principles.
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13. •Lack of trust
•Lack of face time
•Splitting work between teams
•Collaboration / Communication
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15. Let’s talk about tools & practices for communication & collaboration
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•Collaboration means ...
◦Working together to find solutions, etc.
•Communication means ... sharing
◦Ideas, information, decisions, solutions, etc.
◦Understand the media
◦Know the audience
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•Set up communication channels so all team members have access to
◦decisions made
◦planning sessions
◦meeting notes
•Lowest common denominator for communication
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•Email
◦Broadcast, individual, follow-up on conversations
•Photos – task boards, smart boards
•Videos
Remember .....
•Emails do not show emotions and can be misinterpreted
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•Telephone
•Chat rooms
•Wiki
•Collaborative automation tools
•Mind-mapping tools
•Remote pairing: VPN, Skype, instant messaging, desktop sharing
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•Use video whenever possible
◦Skype, Google phone, teleconferencing
•Put faces on stories and tasks
◦Physical task boards
◦On-line systems
◦Use avatars
•Virtual tele-presence
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23. •Tests provide feedback
•Tests show desired behaviour
•Developers think about testability
•Testers think about the big picture
•Multiple skill sets mean better solution
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24. •Keep the feedback cycle short
•Remove dependencies early
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Note:
Feature teams are preferable with all team members
co-located

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Picture by Augusta Evangelisti, based on diagram from Elisabeth Hendrickson

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Think in Levels of Detail

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DragonFire Inc.

30. •Power of 3
•Pairing
•Question
•Draw pictures
•Repeat verbal conversations in writing
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•Continuous integration
•Integrate testing and coding
•Use common tools
◦Version control
◦Test frameworks
◦Defect tracking
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Consider operations / maintenance teams for support of tests, code

32. •Share information
•Share awareness of dependencies
•Keep everyone “in the loop”
•Same vision
•Same goal
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•Common orientation
•Off –shore teams
•Acquired teams
•New remote team members
•Foster a learning culture
◦Tolerate mistakes
◦Personal safety
•Give time to experiment, to try
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•Command and control
•Think – how to give confidence?
•Provide transparency
•Provide the right support
◦For self-organizing teams
◦Extra positions for liaison
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•Schedules
◦Overlapping times
◦Meetings
◦Share the pain
•Use retrospectives
◦Identify problem areas
◦Experiment with solutions
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•Think constantly of other teams or team members
•Extend help to others
•Between management and development
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•Whole team
•Small chunks of work
•Use your diverse skills
•Respect culture: yours and others
•Give teams time to experiment, learn
•Maintain discipline
•Avoid silos – geographical or functional
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Collaborate to innovate
or
Innovate to collaborate
Use retrospectives to improve!!
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Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams More Agile Testing: Learning Journeys for the Whole Team By Janet Gregory and Lisa Crispin www.agiletester.ca
Contact info www.janetgregory.ca Email: janet@agiletester.ca Twitter: janetgregoryca
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•Practices for Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Large, Multisite and Offshore Product Development with Large-Scale Scrum, Craig Larman and Bas Vodde, Addison-Wesley, 2010
•Agile Software Development in the Large: Diving into the Deep, Jutta Eckstein, Dorset House, 2004
•Fearless Change: Patterns for introducing new ideas, Linda Rising and Mary Lynn Manns
•Agile-testing@yahoogroups.com
•Pictures taken on safari in Kenya and Tanzania with Nature Encounters Tours,
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•www.lisacrispin.com
•Rothman Consulting Group, Inc. Vol 9, #5: Building Trust in any Team
•http://leadingsoftwaretestinginanagileworld.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/distributed-agile-test-teams-making-it.html
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