Scrum is a software development process. In today’s rapid world stakeholders want immediate return on their investments. They don’t want to wait for longer periods to get full featured product. As a result, nowadays new software development and testing framework is catching momentum i.e. Scrum approach.

In scrum, projects are divided in small features to be developed and tested in specific time-frames called as sprint (small cycles). Features should get developed and tested in specified small time-frames.  This agile scrum team is handled by scrum master.

Scrum is an iterative, incremental framework for projects and products or application development. Scrum has become more and more popular software development and testing framework among organizations. Many small to large sized IT companies have started to embrace Scrum framework, as this can create excellent quality products in less time than other traditional methodologies. This framework can save companies both time and money.

Source: ScrumAlliance

Soft Skills for a Scrum Team:

What Soft Skills are required to be a Successful Scrum Team?

When we start our regular (Agile) sprints (Cycles of work), we usually find some of the challenges with our team members. These challenges are not part of technical difficulties.  It usually occurs with team member’s mindset or their soft skills.  Many successful Scrum projects taught us that the success of scrum depends on how team members support whole heartedly towards the Sprint.

Let us discuss some of the pre-requisite soft skills for a Scrum Team.

Team Spirit

Cross functional Team work is at the heart of Scrum.  There is no “my work”, “I have finished my work” and “your work”. On a Scrum team we find only “Our work”, “we have completed our Sprint”.  Individuals will have helping tendency for sharing technical knowledge. Scrum Members are always available to team members rather than locked away behind closed doors.  Scrum Master will always motivate the teams and create a Supporting learning environment. Team will always be sprint-oriented and often discuss smooth run of the sprint. A scrum team’s job is to self-organize around the challenges and management’s job is to remove impediments to self-organization.

Communication

Good communication must exist among team members of development team, testing team, business analysts and stake holders. There must be highly collaborative interaction between client and the delivery teams. More client involvement implies more suggestions or changes from the client.  It implies more bandwidth for communication.

Commitment

Agile Teams needs periodic re-energizing to renew their commitments to their purpose and to each other.  Scrum Masters can help by ensuring that the team embraces the concept of whole-team responsibility and whole-team commitment to deliver working software at the end of each sprint. With the whole-team commitment, the team member who has completed his tasks will help the one who has not completed so that hopefully each finishes on time.

Problem Solving

Scrum does not simply focus on developing just any type of end product.  Instead, the Scrum method allows the team to focus on creating a product that fulfils the customer’s highest value priorities which are defined by product owners.

Transparency

Transparency among team members and management gives a real momentum to the scrum team. Scrum Master encourages people to ask for help, surface roadblocks, and give public recognition for those brave enough to do so. At the same time, Scrum Master also understands the time wasted and impact on the team when individuals sit on or ignore problems.

Scrum Result

If scrum team follows some of above said soft skills, team velocity will increase significantly.  In turn, customers will appreciate the results or updates – and also can react quickly to any potential problems. Team can deliver high value software features in a short time period keeps everyone on top of changing business conditions.

About Author: J.B.Rajkumar is a Certified Scrum Master (CSM) and he has rich experience in Agile/Scrum framework. He has worked as Corporate Trainer, Project Lead, QA Manager and QC Manager. He has implemented Scrum in no. of projects in his current organization. He is a frequent speaker on Agile/Scrum for International Conferences, Colleges, Universities and Software Industries. He conducts training on Scrum and Agile Testing.  Presently he is with Automation Practice, in one of the top MNCs.

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How to Deliver High Value Software Features in a Short Time Period using Agile Scrum Process

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Is it just an AD in changing the health and mind-set of people or an AD to increase the mobile connection sales?
I’m not even sure whether you would call it just another AD or maybe a hidden message for doctors or traditional seasoned managers, whom I have correlated it after seeing this AD. The context of roles is different but the consciousness prescription is the same ‘Practice what you preach’ – ‘Walk when you talk’

So, would I like to be classified under ‘walk and talk’ or ‘talk and talk’?

I certainly do not want to die yet another ‘talk and talk’ – preach and preach supervisor under at any context.

I have realized this time in Germany that I do not want to be a great tester, best supervisor, best test analyst but I do wish eagerly to be a ‘team-defender’, so that I can preach the team members what I have learnt from my mistakes for several years being a tester and on the deeper domain.

I also do not want to create and possess the best method of personal growth and make my profile very impressive in LinkedIn – yet I do want to keep my passion for testing skills’ alive in my profile. I don’t want to be treated just another resource for billable, but more to do with how valued I will be for the team.

I don’t like to create a bit of suspicious of skip level meeting amongst the team members, but I would like to be fairly judged by the team in written and having no known name or identity of the team members.

I don’t want to prove myself as an accomplished supervisor by showing sizeable numbers of direct-reports under my belt, but I’ll like to be the single point of contact for my team’s fear. I don’t want to be called as excel expert manager, who worries for numbers or percentages of work done, but I’ll like to be part of a self-management team.

I don’t want to be a clever supervisor, but I would like to be a fair and clear ‘team-defender’.

Now, please don’t think of this as a highly intellectual statement, I belong to the same class of individuals classified as tester, test lead, or test manager and know the importance and having the knowledge of the test operation, test management and as well as the painstaking, backbreaking, mind numbing effort that goes into making those pretty-looking presentations in PPT and every minute updating the spreadsheets. However, it is like one of those moments when some severity 1 and priority 1 defects falls in place from production and creates a panic at all level of management and you have to celebrate it by announcing it to the management that ‘We have verified the defect on-time’ and my boss consciousness would have said “Hooo…the team has saved my butt, lucky by chance” and hence, here I’m a step closer to the blessed state of knowingly doing what I’m suppose to do along with my team members – ‘walk when you talk’

Well said by great Sir Ji, chief architect of India (CAI):

“An ounce of practice is worth more than tons of preaching“

You must be thinking, who the heck is great Sir Ji, CAI? Yes, you’re right!

About Author:
This is a guest article by “Kajal Das“.
Kajal Das is a tester, working for LHS Ericsson, Germany as senior test expert and having practical telecoms CRM domain testing knowledge. He act as a point of contact between various telecoms service provider customers in determining all aspect of CRM testing being done in a practical and useful way.

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How To Be a Good Team Mentor, Coach and a True Team-Defender in an Agile Testing World? – The Inspiration

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Abstract
Recently, when I wanted to start my new Automated Testing Project with four resources, I thought of applying any one of the Agile methodologies. But I was not able to continue because, a series of questions were raised inside my mind. The questions are like “Is it possible to use Agile methodologies in Automated Testing?”, “Can I use traditional tools”, “Should I have to go for open-source tools”, “What are the challenges I have to face if I am implementing automation in Agile Environment”. In this article let us analyze some of challenges we face while implementing Automation with Agile methodologies. Automated testing in the Agile environment stands a risk of becoming chaotic, unstructured and uncontrolled.

Agile Projects present their own challenges to the Automation team; Unclear project scope, Multiple iterations, Minimal documentation, early and frequent Automation needs and active stakeholder involvement all demand lot of challenges from the Automation Team. Some of these challenges are:

Challenge 1: Requirement Phase
Test Automation developer captures requirements in the form of “user stories”, which are brief descriptions of customer-relevant functionality.

Each requirement has to be prioritized as follows:

High: These are mission critical requirements that absolutely have to be done in the first release
Medium: These are requirements that are important but can be worked around until implemented.
Low: These are requirements that are nice-to-have but not critical to the operation of the software.

Once priories are established, the release “iterations” are planned. Normally, each Agile release iteration takes between 1 to 3 months to deliver. Customers/software folks take liberty to make too many changes to the requirements. Sometimes, these changes are so volatile that the iterations are bumped off. These changes are greater challenges in implementing Agile Automation testing process.

Challenge 2: Selecting the Right Tools

Traditional, test-last tools with record-and-playback-features force teams to wait until after the software is done. More over, traditional test automation tools don’t work for an Agile context because they solve traditional problems, and those are different from the challenges facing Agile Automation teams. Automation in the early stages of an agile project is usually very tough, but as the system grows and evolves, some aspects settle and it becomes appropriate to deploy automation. So the choice of testing tools becomes critical for reaping the efficiency and quality benefits of agile.

Challenge 3: Script Development Phase

The Automation testers, developers, business analysts and project stakeholders all contribute to kick-off meetings where “user-stories” are selected to next sprint. Once the “user-stories” are selected for the sprint, they are used as the basis for a set of tests.

As functionality grows with each iteration, regression testing must be performed to ensure that existing functionality has not been impacted by the introduction of new functionality in each iteration cycle. The scale of the regression testing grows with each sprint and ensures that this remains a manageable task the test team use the test automation for the regression suite.

Challenge 4: Resource Management

The Agile approach requires a mixture of testing skills, that is, test resource will be required to define unclear scenarios and test cases, conduct manual testing alongside developers, write automated regression tests and execute the automated regression packages. As the project progresses, specialist skills will also be required to cover further test areas that might include integration and performance testing. There should be an appropriate mix of domain specialist who plan and gather requirements. The challenging part in the Resource management is to find out test resources with multiple skills and
allocate them.

Challenge 5: Communication

Good communication must exist among Automation testing team, developers, business analysts and stake holders. There must be highly collaborative interaction between client and the delivery teams. More client involvement implies more suggestions or changes from the client. It implies more bandwidth for communication. The key challenge is that the process should be able to capture and effectively implement all the changes and data integrity needs to be retained. In traditional testing, developers and testers are like oil and water, but in agile environment, the challenging task is that they both must work together to achieve the target.

Challenge 6: Daily Scrum Meeting

Daily Scrum Meeting is one of the key activities in Agile Process. Teams do meet for 15 minutes stand up sessions. What is the effectiveness of these meetings? How far these meetings help Automation practice Developers?

Challenge 7: Release Phase

The aim of Agile project is to deliver a basic working product as quickly as possible and then to go through a process of continual improvement. This means that there is no single release phase for a product. The challenging part lies in integration testing and acceptance testing of the product.

If we can meet these challenges in a well optimized manner, then Automated Regression Testing in Agile environment is an excellent opportunity for QA to take leadership of the agile processes. It is better placed to bridge the gap between users and developers, understand both what is required, how it can be achieved and how it can be assured prior to deployment. Automation practice should have a vested interest in both the how and the result, as well as continuing to assure that the whole evolving system meets business objectives and is fit for purpose.

About the Author:
J.B.Rajkumar has more than 15 years of experience in both Academics and Software Testing. He has worked as Corporate Trainer, Test Lead, QA Manager and QC Manager. He is a frequent speaker for International Conferences, Colleges, Universities and Software Industries. Presently he is with Automation Practice, in one of the top MNCs.

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Automated Regression Testing Challenges in Agile Environment

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Why Need of Innovations in the Age of Agile Testing?

Global Recession/Economic downtime effect
Current Events are not Current Trends –

When global downturns hit, there is certain inevitability to their impact on information technology and Finance Sectors. Customers become more reluctant in giving software business. Some customers are withdrawing their long term projects and some customers using the opportunities in quoting low price. Many projects that dragged much longer than expected and cost more than planned. So, Companies started to explore how “Agile with different flavors” can help their Enterprises more reliably deliver software quickly and iteratively. The roles and responsibilities of Test Managers/Test Architects become more important in implementing Agile Projects. Innovations are increasingly being fueled by the needs of the testing society at large.

The Challenges in Agile Testing

Agile Testers face lot of challenges when they are working with Agile development team. A tester should be able to apply Root-Cause Analysis when finding severe bugs so that they unlikely to reoccur. While Agile has different flavors, Scrum is one process for implementing Agile. Some of the challenging scrum rules to be followed by every individual are

•  Obtain Number of Hours Commitment Up Front
•  Gather Requirements / Estimates Up Front
•  Entering the actual hours and estimated hours daily.
•  Daily Builds
•  Keep the Daily Scrum meetings short
•  Code Inspections are Paramount

So, in order to meet the above challenges, an agile tester needs to be innovative with the tools that they have. A great idea happens when what you have (tangible and intangible) meets the world’s deepest hunger

How Testers Can be More Innovative in the Age of Agile Testing?

Here are Important Keys to Innovation:

1. Creative

A good Agile Tester needs to be extremely creative when trying to cope up with speed of development/release.  For a tester, being creative is more important than being critical.

2. Talented

He must be highly talented and strives for more learning and innovating new ideas. Talented Testers are never satisfied with what they have achieved and always strives to find unimaginable bugs of high value and priority.

3. Fearless

An Agile Tester should not be afraid to look at a developer’s code and if need be, hopefully in extreme cases, go in and correct it.

4. Visionary

He must have a comprehensive vision, which includes client’s expectations and delivery of the good product.

5. Empowered

He must be empowered to work in Pairs.  He will be involving in Pair Programming to bring shorter scripts, better designs and finding more bugs.

6. Passionate

Passionate Testers always have something unique to contribute that may be in terms of their innovative ideas, the way they carry day-to-day work, their outputs and improve things around them tirelessly.

7. Multiple Disciplines

Agile Tester must have multiple skills like, Manual, Functional, Performance testing skills and soft skills like Leadership skills, Communication skills, EI, etc. so that agile testing will become a cake walk.

“Innovation is the process of turning ideas into manufacturable and marketable form”        -  Watts Humpry

This is a guest post from J.B.Rajkumar. About Author: J.B. Rajkumar has extensive experience in both Academics and Software Testing.  He was a Trainer, QA Manager,  frequent Speaker for Colleges, Universities and International Conferences and currently  working with a top MNC

Note from Vijay: If you have ANY queries on “Agile Testing and its methods”, please do comment below. We will address each and every comment in separate post.

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7 Tips to be More Innovative in the Age of Agile Testing to Survive an Economic Crisis

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