Test progress reporting can be cumbersome. There is a complex story to be told, but it needs to be done in such a way that the business and project stakeholders get the message. Sequential planning techniques such as critical path analysis won’t work in agile, but stakeholders keep asking for an indication of the progress so far, the work that remains, the bottlenecks and dependencies.
Within my current project we solved this problem by introducing a visual progress report, the subway map. Subway map reports are derived from the London tube map and contain the following elements: 1) Stations: Activities are represented as a station; they have a description of the benefit for the stakeholder upon completion. 3) Date lines provide status information (the train is expected on time, or not) 3) Bridges: Where two or more lines merge, you can define have a quality gate. They provide extra control on the progress (and of course to celebrate success)
I gave this presentation at the EXPO:QA in Madrid. It contains examples, a step plan how to make a subway map in Powerpoint. Within my organization it has been adopted quickly by various projects, due to its simplicity and clearness. Business finally understood testing.
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