Agile 2007 Conference (Day 1)
On Monday, I went to one of the research-in-progress sessions, an experience report, and a session on Guerilla Agile. For both the research-in-progress session and the experience report, I really only wanted to hear from one of the three speakers. While I did learn a bit from the other speakers, I’m going to change my strategy to only go to sessions with one presenter who I really want to hear from.
From the research-in-progress
- Define ‘done’ and make sure everyone (stakeholders too) knows what it means.
From the experience report
- Keep a trend of metrics over time, to ensure that we are heading in the proper direction.
- Report on number of manual tests, to highlight the fact that we need need to automate them.
- Investigate ‘Wizard of Oz’ testing.
- Push for all members of the team to think cross-functionally.
- Features delivered per person/team per time period (metric to use).
- Provide agile training for product owners.
- Let everyone know that they will make mistakes when adapting to agile. The idea is to work on improving.
- SalesForce.com switched over to agile. They handle regression testing by allocating an iteration just before the release build to do the regression testing. Still, automating the manual testing is better.
From Guerilla Agile
- Use differently-colored notecards to distinguish between normal user stories, bugs, etc.
- Focus on prioritization and ROI (stakeholders will understand that).
Random thought
- To sell quality to senior management, run statistics (e.g., cyclomatic complexity) against a new application and a legacy application. Show them that adding a feature of similar complexity takes a certain amount of time with the application that has <value1> for one of the statistics, but takes twice the amount of time against a system with a value of <value2>.