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Book Learning Programming

Programming Skills

Not only Ruby is a great programming/ scripting language to do your daily jobs or to automate your testing tasks, also Perl is.
Find a free (GNU Free Documentation Licence) Perl training as HTML or PDF on the homepage of Greg London

Also Python is a great language, and a lot of free books & tutorials are existing to learn it, e.g. Learn Python The Hard Way by Zed A. Shaw, which can be downloaded as PDF. But please be aware that this is a book for absolute programming beginners!

Via http://www.schockwellenreiter.de/

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Book

Book Study Group: “Agile Testing”, Chapter 4

For personel interest I decided to read chapter 4 „Team Logistics“ of Agile Testing, before we decided to do so in the book study group, here is my outcome:

  • Team Structure communication is critical!
    • Independent QA teams
      • lead to division between programmers & testers
      • are inefficient
      • structures & reasons should be changed
      • testers as learning CoP, QA managers as „leader“/ „teachers“
    • Integration of testers into an agile project
      • testers (also) need training -> critical/ crucial
      • programmers need training on testing (skills)
      • pairing of programmers & testers
        • improves communication
        • is efficient
      • only 1 budget/ schedule
      • -> how does this fit into a big organization with multiple scrum teams and multiple independeent QA-teams?
      • testing as part of the DoD
      • testers are full fledged team members (use retrospective to improve)
      • testing tasks are as important as all other tasks (use retrospective to improve)
      • new definition of QA & development managers to be found
    • Agile project teams
      • cross-functional, but „whole team effort“
      • build team depending on project´s needs <- refactor as needed
      • tester´s CoP, driven by QA manager
  • Physical logistics
    • -> Co-location of all team members!
    • support communication of distributed teams (phone, webcam, instant messaging, …)
  • Resources
    • tester-developer ratio
      it depends… on
      • complexity of the AUT
      • skillset of the tester
      • used tools
      • -> number of test taks taken by programmers (?)
    • focus on skills instead of ratio
    • use retrospectives to find out if hiring a tester would solve the problem (!)
  • Hiring an agile tester
  • Building a team
    • self-organizing team: team can identify & solve problems on their own -> best progress
    • involving other teams: bring teams together, so they can learn from each other
    • performance and rewards
      • measuring & rating individual performance risks undermining team collaboration
      • good performance shouldn´t be victimized if team doesn´t perform well
      • don´t blame the tester if a bug gets discovered in production
    • set goals which
      • serve business
      • increase profibility
      • make customers happy
      • -> generalized(?): which add value?
    • celebrate success
    • What can you do?
      • get team principles from chapter 2 to work
      • communication
      • feedback
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Book

Book Study Group: “Agile Testing”, Chapter 18

During our latest book study group session some of the members of the group stated that they aren’t interested in reading the whole book, since they would not benefit from every chapter. So we decided to read the (at first sight) most interesting (looking) chapters first and then see how to go on.
So as next chapter to study and discuss, we decided on „Chapter 18, Coding and Testing“.
First of all, I have to admit, that from the title I would have expected a more technical content; I expected to see things like examples of code and unit tests, see automated tests and stuff like this, but this wasn’t the case, and at the beginning I was a bit surprised. 😉

But here we go, my notes & summary on the chapter:

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Book

Book Study Group: “Agile Testing”, Chapter 21

For some strange reason I can´t follow (without having talked to anyone yet) the book study group decided to study chapter 21 for this week´s session. Chapter 21 has the headline „Key success factors“ and is more or less a summary of all the chapters before. Seven key success factors are given, here my notes/ remarks to this.
Things in “ are quoted directly from the book, normal text is my abstract, and things marked by an arrow ‚->‘ are my comments on something.

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Book Learning

Book Study Group: „Agile Testing“

Two weeks ago, at work we had the kick-off-session for a „Book Study Group“.
In a former „book swashing session“ facilitated by Deborah Preuss and Sebastian Lang, it came out that we want to start with „Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams“ by Lisa Crispin & Janet Gregory or with „Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship“ by Robert C. Martin.