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In this post, we'll be talking about how to combine the best aspects of two different product development techniques to create a hybrid approach that saves you time and money while helping you avoid risks to your company.
You see, creatives (myself included) are often very passionate about what we do and would love nothing more than to do it all on our own.
Test automation is a vital part of agile development. Serving as a force that helps to maximize QA procedures, an agile project with no automation can be conveniently referred to as a waterfall project in phases. In this article, we examine the importance of agile test automation in agile methodologies.
Agile testing is a continuous software testing process that follows all the principles of agile software development. This methodology has dominated the software testing industry in the last few years. Companies moved from waterfall testing to agile testing to promote the software life cycle’s continuous iteration.
Even though Agile (and other methodologies like Kanban and Scrum that fall under the Agile umbrella) were developed for the IT industry, other departments have found success implementing the core ideas. It does require some tweaking and getting non-IT staff to buy into the process, but Agile is no longer only the tech department's sole property. First, we will look at the core concepts of an Agile methodology and how to get non-tech employees to adopt the methodology.
When a team leader embarks on researching how to implement Agile, they’ll come across several opinion pieces proclaiming that very few understand Agile. These are enough to put even the most even-keeled off when looking to incorporate a non-tech team within the Agile bubble. However, when one looks at Agile’s core concepts, it's easy to see why others think the future is bright.
Agile teams, like any, face their challenges. And while the agile method has often been discussed like a magic cure-all for organization and task efficiency, it’s got to be done properly in order to be successful.
Because the agile method is more than just a gimmick way of selling stuff. It is an efficient setup for businesses to use in order to boost productivity and cost-efficiencies.
Despite what some people may think, accountability and Agile are not mutually exclusive.
How does your organization incorporate accountability? Is it part of your organization's value statement or part of your enterprise culture? Most companies and leaders I’ve worked with (Agile or otherwise) are not very good with accountability.
Imagine this was your Agile team: Your Product Owner has expert domain knowledge but is more focused on career progression than on developing a great product. The Business Analyst is thorough but is a poor time manager and often misses deadlines. Your lead Developer is a highly talented and creative coder, but is also a real pain to work with; he belittles others, keeps everything to himself, and believes he is too important to attend Daily Stand-ups.
I used to internally cringe when people mentioned code review – where developers check each other’s work after it has been implemented and suggest improvements. The tests were in place, QA had signed off, the product owner was happy. Surely by definition code review was just the practice of looking for problems.
If that sums up how you feel about code review, then sorry — you’re going to hate this. Nowadays, I think peer review is one of the most powerful devices for projecting best practice in a product, a team, a company and beyond. Notice I call it peer review rather than code review. To me, there are some important differences. Code review is good – it raises standards and awareness of standards. But peer review is more powerful still.