Agile Thoughts

CONNECT Visit Agile Thoughts and register to receive free development, analysis, or leadership and management materials and learn to excel at developing software. I’ll also send information on my low cost email courses you can take via the internet. 060 Kanban Thanksgiving Thanksgiving. It’s a time for families to get together, interact, and feast. The …

Dhaval: Here's what I liked is that at the end today's class, we were talking about the fact that competitor analysis is added as another product backlog item for the team to actually go and investigate on their own and take more ownership of the product, which is contrary in some respects. And you should correct me on this Bas.

Dhaval: There's no industry today that is safe. In other words, the taxi industry you got taken over by Uber and left.

In the pre-guttenberg days, printing the Bible was done by teams of monks with a lot of hand crafted labor—even the paper and ink had to be made. Many hands over one year were involved in the production of a single bible. Software development is the same way.

TDD is a clever process. By writing your test before the code, you end up growing your test with the code.  

Bas Vodde, in the bay area. One of the founders of less. Boss: How can we get the same fun dynamics of a single team but working with multiple teams? Because often they add so much stuff and bureaucracy and distance between the teams and the actual users, that it's no fun anymore.

Bas Vodde in the bay area, one of the founders of LeSS on “Why Scaling?”

I think you get the idea--there are a lot of different scaling Scrum frameworks.  How to effectively scale Scrum from a single team to hundreds is the big question many in the industry are trying to solve.  

Let's say your job was to write a program that types to the screen the word: AWARE.

Over the last twenty years the Agile revolution which used to be edgy and alternative is now mainstream with most teams in the IT industry using Scrum and Kanban. You may not have realized that although those two popular lite weight frameworks are valuable changes, they don't at all address how to construct code that supports frequent delivery.

Today is the future. [echo, jetsons sounds or future sounding music] The world has been marching forward but still there are no flying cars.  [whawha wha..] Well, there are flying cars but none mass produced. Why not? Are We developers and we managers part of the reason why we still don't have such nice things?  Is the low quality track record of IT to blame?  Must we be used getting patches, and upon installation, hoping this new version doesn't make things worse?  

​ Recall the pyramid generally has three floors: the penthouse filled with UI macro tests, the middle is inhabited by subcutaneous macro tests, and the ground floor--a plethora of micro tests. The goal of CI is to give valuable feedback to a team as fast as possible.

​At this point, I hope you got the ideas of why overdoing the upper floors of the pyramid will cause it to tumble. In the previous episode I mentioned you can get a test pyramid worksheet. This worksheet can be used to plan out how to build your project's mighty pyramid of test.

​ Sphinx, a mythological creature with the head of a man and the body of a lion, loves to ask questions and demands answers. If you don't answer the questions correctly, the Sphinx eats you. In IT, the closest to a Sphinx are QA or Release managers, who although may not eat you, will ask questions in order to decide if your product is in good shape.

Teams have found that just because acceptance criteria COULD be made into hard to maintain and unreliable UI test, many of them actually don't need to be executed via the UI but instead in some sub layer beneath.

Images of the test automation pyramid are available online and you'll see good agreement that macro tests are at the top and micro tests in the bottom. But there's a lot of mystery about what goes into the middle floor. I've put on my leather hat and brought my bullwhip and explored the automation pyramids at many other companies.

While the bottom of the test pyramid is biggest enough to house a few soccer fields and a monster truck rally, the top floor of the pyramid only has room for a long long table, a big screen tv, and a minibar fridge. Oh yeah, and macro tests.

The smallest floor of the pyramid is the top as it's much narrower than the spacious bottom. While the top only has room for a ping pong table and a TV, the bottom has room for a soccer field or two.

To have sustainable test automation, there is this idea that you need two levels of testing: macrotests, and microstests.