Monday, February 1, 2010

My first post in 2010

Fine, i know i am a little late. It took me some time to get my new laptop and a new internet connection and so instead of 1Jan2010, my first blogpost for this year is on 1Feb2010. Does it matter? I dont think so..I am probably going to blabber the same things anyway ;-)
Mike Cohn, yes The Mike Cohn, personally recommended this book to me "Agile Testing" by Lisa Crispon and Janet Gregory. I have been reading it from past few days and here is a list of couple of notes I had made for myself from the book:

1) Agile testing means using each team member's skill to improve quality. When Agile says quality is a whole team's responsibility, it doesn't mean that testers are not necessary, but the approach here is to make testing everyone's responsibility. It should never be considered as a means to lessen the team size by avoiding to have a specialist tester.

2) Agile is not all about speed, but its all about quality. A team that delivers on time but not delivers on quality, is not an agile team at all..

3) Being an agile tester is not at all easy. It requires one to know something of everything an agile team might use. So an agile tester should know how to translate business needs into application requirements, should participate with developers to achieve maximum amount of unit test coverage, should be able to automate the regression tests, and should be a good if not excellent at exploratory testing. The most important trait is the willingness to learn.

4) Testers tend to be customer focused. This is a very minute thing to be balanced within an agile team as though testers work with other members, they always or most of the time represent customer's point of view. This is a delicate position to be in and if not handled properly, can be a little annoying for the team and may effect the coherence of the team.

5) A very nice sentence that I came to read in the book goes, "Successful projects are a result of good people allowed to do good work"
will keep sharing more as I read on ;)

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