Keynote line up for Agile TD USA announced

Have a preview on the keynote line-up in Chicago. More info can be found on the Agile Testing Days USA webpage. 

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Meet the Program Chairs of Agile Testing Days USA

I am thrilled to be a part of the Agile Testing Days USA Program committee. The ATD USA will be held 23-27 Juni 2019 in Chicago. Together with Janet Gregory, Pete Walen, Ash Coleman, Matt Heußer, Faiza Yousuf, Raj Subramanian and Mike Talks we get to select the proposals. I have been reviewing some of them, and amongst them are some nice gems. This will be a great conference.

See: https://lnkd.in/dmzvXJq

Amazing Tutorial on Agile Test Management

Yesterday Jan Jaap Cannegieter and I gave an amazing tutorial at the Agile testing days. In our full day tutorial we discussed the role of the test manager and how to add value in an agile environment.

We discovered that a test manager is operation at two interfaces. One is being that of a quality ambassador that shows the business and stakeholders how testing is done and how its progressing . On the other interface the test manager is enabling the team(s) to build quality into their deliverables. During this full day tutorial we deep dived on both aspects. We discussed the agile test strategy and investigated what activities we test managers undertake, what activities we find important and what is valued most by our stakeholder. You wouldn’t be surprised if we told you that there is a gap between both. Next we practiced with defining agile test plans at MVP and sprint level. And assessed other roles that test managers can adopt. We closed the full circle by concluding that extra activities might be added to our initial brainstorm results. The topic is truly alive. Not only did we have a full rum (we had an all-time conference record with the amount of attendees), during the day we had a lot of lively discussions and answered a lot of questions from the participants. We loved the participation of all in the room and believe we all had a good day.

Please see the slides we used below. We included some photos of the workshop results.

Le dernier jour et je ne sais toujours pas – The Last Day and I Still Don’t Know

The EuroSTAR conference is getting close. I will be hosting an interactive session on Do 15 November, 3:15 pm. In style with the conference theme this session is called: le dernier jour et je ne sais toujours pas – The Last Day and I Still Don’t Know. During the session you will be able to ask any question that remained unanswered during the conference. Since I do not hold all the knowledge myself I asked help from:

• Egbert Bouman
• Declan O’Riordan
• Joel Montvelisky
• Rob Sabourin

If we do not have the answer you might know! During this informal interactive session, you can share your thoughts or help your fellow participants by recapturing those sessions that they missed. So, if you want an answer to that one lingering question, sort your thoughts and get a wrap-up on the conference. Don’t leave yet; this is the session to attend.

We hope to see you in the room !

SQMag published our article on Testing And Quality in SAFe

Proud to share the latest copy of SQmag with you.

SQ mag is dedicated to creative software developers, testers and visionaries. For their 5th edition the editorial team put together amazing interviews with powerful leaders of software testing industry, interesting articles, and much more.

Mette Bruhn Pedersen and I contributed with our article about embedding Quality in Scaling Agile Environments. This article has previously been published by Bits&Chips magazine, but we trust our message will now reach an even wider audience.

You can download SQ magazine for free at the publisher website.
You can read our article here: Testing And Quality in SAFe

Interview CI/CD during QA&Testing Conference

During the QA&Testing Conference Mae Albes took me aside to ask me a few questions. In the interview she asks me about the tutorial I gave on CI/CD. Conclusion: it takes some effort to make CI/CD truly work and there is a wide spread in where organisations stand with their CI/CD implementation. You can see the video below:

Tester’s considerations when moving towards successful CI/CD

Today I opened the QA&Testing Conference with a Tutorial on Continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD). In this interactive session we had a look at what it takes to make it a success. This is much more than just building the pipeline. In a new case assignment we deep dived in the test approach needed to build quality in every step op de CI/CD process. You can find the slides and the included workshop results below:

 

Workshop description: Continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) empowers organisations to bring their solution in production fast and frequent. This interactive session will share the benefits of this concept and introduce eight conditions that need to be met in order to make CI/CD a success. After this brief introduction, we will make small groups and explore these conditions, exchange experiences and you will get an understanding what needs to be improved in your organisation. Talk to your peers and learn where they stand. Of course each of the groups will share their learnings, so we all go home with an understanding of how you can benefit from CI/CD and what needs to be done to make it work.Finally we will see what test strategy we would advise if our company would decide to move towards CI/CD and this cover we consider much more than just automate our tests…

 

Testing and Quality in the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe 4.6 version)

 

Last night Mette and I presented the closing keynote of the TestNet Fall Event. In our keynote we shared our ideas on how the embed Quality and Testing in Scaled Agile Environments. Ever since we are working on this topic we find that a lot of information is available. The SAFe 4.6 release has more focus on quality than the previous versions had, but from our expertise we add some extra measures that quality professionals can take to add value. It’s a call for action for the community. We should be proactively emphasising the need to embed quality thinking not just at the team level, but also at higher levels in the organisation. In our keynote we gave some suggestions. I believe we gave a great keynote that resonated with the audience.  If you want more information we suggest to contact us or read on of out publications:

• Bits and Chips Article
• EuroSTAR eBook

Please find the slides below:

Keynote: Testing and Quality in the Scaled Agile Framework for Lean Enterprises (SAFe 4.6 version) from Derk-Jan de Grood

Keynote: Testing and Quality in the SAFe framework

Less than a week to go!

On 10 October Mette Bruhn-Pedersen and I will give a keynote presentation on the testnet conference. Proud to be giving a keynote on this great event and enthusiastic about sharing the stage with Mette.  In our keynote we will discuss how testers can contribute with their knowledge and expertise in a scaled agile organisation.

We will use the Scaled Agile Framework for Lean Enterprises (SAFe) challenges how testers, Q&A and test managers, and test specialists work together with the entire organisation. Although the framework is described in more details than other comparable frameworks it is not very elaborate on how testing and quality practices fit in. This raises new challenges for testers, Q&A and test managers, test architects, test specialists and people in similar roles together with the entire organisation. We will describe what guidance SAFe actually provides and suggest additional ways test and QA professionals can contribute with their special knowledge and expertise.

Key Takeaways of the keynote:

• Test and QA professionals can add value at all organisational levels in ways that are not described in SAFe.
• Defining a quality strategy is key to handle typical issues with test and QA activities spanning multiple teams and even multiple Release Trains.
• Getting quality and testing anchored on Portfolio Level ensures that quality can be built-in from top to bottom.

The keynote is accompanied by an article and eBook that were previously published by Bits&chips Magazine and EuroSTAR. You can find them here:

• Bits & Chips Article: Ensuring Quality in SAFe – Sept 2018
• EuroSTAR eBook – Quality and Testing in SAFe – April 2018

Over Coffee, Qualifiers and Disqualifiers

Today I was approached by a colleague of mine. He had heard in a presentation that he attended that I had done some work on the Coffee taste (or flavor) wheel. He thought it to be an interesting idea and wanted to know some details. We took a nice coffee and I explained the set-up to him:

In coffee land (but also in whiskey land) they use a taste (or flavor) wheel to describe tastes that you can look for while sampling the coffee. See the illustration for an example made by the Specialty Coffee Association of America. The taste wheel serves as a kind of checklist, but also helps to give names to the flavors. It provides a language that is commonly understood among the tasters. The coffee taste wheel displays both the disqualifiers (bad tastes like burned, to bitter, etc.) and the nice flavors (the qualifiers) of the coffee.
We can use this idea to make or own testers-taste-wheel, include it in our test strategy and find our own language to make the business understand how we rate the system under test.

More information can be found here:

• A Tutorial I gave at the Freetest conference
• An article I wrote on the topic

Cover Article Bits & Chips – Ensuring quality when scaling agile

Proud to see that the article I wrote with Mette Bruhn-Pedersen on quality in scaled agile environments is the cover article of the september Issue of Bits & Chips magazine. The article gives an insight in what the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) says about quality and testing. We also share our thoughts on how, at the various layers of the Portfolio configuration, we can contribute to embed quality and testing measures.

You can read the article in Bits&chips or preview it here: Ensuring Quality when scaling Agile 

The 23nd Testing Retreat was awesome !

This weekend I spent my time in together with 14 peers from the profession. We gathered to share our experiences and war stories, to benchmark opinions and discus trends in the testing Profession. The Testing Retreat is an international peer conference that aims to discuss relevant test topics and inspire its participants. During this 23rd edition we had participants from the Netherlands, UK, Belgium, Poland, Denmark and even the USA. During normal conferences there is mostly little time to have the in-dept sessions of the kind that the retreat hosts. Some of this year’s agenda topics were:

• Challenges for the profession
• Looking in the crystal ball – Trends
• The Agile Tester
• What are key knowledge items we need to teach our young professionals
• Blockchain (p=np)
• Lean vs Agile
• Failure modes while transitioning to Agile

But we discussed a lot of non-agenda topics during the breaks, dinner and time-of moments. E.g. AI and Ml, Scaling Agile, Security and test automation. It was a very nice, inspiring weekend, that I trust enables participant to improve their value as test professional and to see developments in right perspective. I am already looking forward for next year’s edition.

Transforming testing to fit modern development- Agile testing

On 12 September Andreas Prins and I gave two presentation on the TestNet session night. The theme of the event was: Transforming testing to fit modern development. Andreas identified various rhythms (or wavelengths) in the SDLC and explained the automation that can be done in order to have short lead times and frequent feedback on code quality and delivered value.

My presentation was called “I am an agile tester, because…”. During my talk I discussed what it takes to be an agile tester and I introduced 12 statements that can be used as manifesto for the agile tester. During the presentation 49 participants filled in the survey and we got a nice impression of how agile our testing is. You can find the results below, and in the slide deck.

Using a recent project I was involved in I put these statements to the test. I explain the test strategy I applied and shared my successes and failures. One of the participants tweeted about the presentation: “A nice war story. The 12 statements trigger me to think about my own role and the role of testing within my project and organization”. I think I succeeded my mission.

If you want to perform the survey yourself and find out what makes you an agile tester, you can find it at the valori website (in dutch). If you want an English version, do not hesitate to contact me.

Please find the slides of my presentation below:

A Game Called Scaling

Scaling agile is becoming a hot topic.  Furthermore organizations more and more start to understand that business agility and responsiveness is a key factor to survive and stay ahead of their competitors. In order to yield value, the work of single agile teams should be integrated and embedded in larger business processes. The adoption of agile is shifting from a single team focus to a wider organizational approach

In May this year Valori piloted a serious game in which participants experience the challenges of inter-team collaboration and gain insight in the various scaling agile frameworks, like SAFe, LESS and Nexus.

This Video gives an impression of the game when we hosted it at the TestNet Event. If you like to experience the Scaling Agile Game yourself contact me or someone at Valori.

Transforming towards modern development

On 12 september TestNet is organising an event called “Transforming towards modern development”:

 Andreas Prins (VP Product Development @XebiaLabs) will talk about the different faces of testing in DevOps. We all know testing is an ever recurring theme, but to deliver our applications successfully, practices have to change and we have to broaden our scope. Modern software testing is critical to successful application development, but the approach differs depending on the wavelength.

 I will open the night with my talk called:”I am an agile tester, because“. I will share 12 statements that define the agile tester. We will discuss how these statements impact the software development life cycle and how they enable you to explain why you do what you do as a tester, to improve yourself and discuss it with your team.

Together the two talks will give insight on how we transform our testing to fit modern development practices.
More info can be found on the testnet website