Software Testing Blog

“Welcome changing requirements, even late in
development. Agile processes harness change for
the customer’s competitive advantage.”

“Agile processes promote sustainable development.
The sponsors, developers, and users should be able
to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.”- from the Agile Manifesto

Okay, now back to the real-world. As Forrester analyst Dave West recently pointed out in an SD Times article, “the reality of agile adoption has diverged from the original ideas described in the Agile Manifesto, with many adoptions resembling what Forrester labels water-Scrum-fall.”

Others have dubbed it Agile-Fall, Scrum-Fall or even fake agile. Whatever you call it, this mixed bag methodology is becoming the norm for test and dev teams – and it’s not hard to figure out why. West continues:

This happens in part because agile adoption has been practitioner-led, leading teams to focus on domains they can influence, mainly the team itself. Areas outside of their control, such as project planning and release management, continue to follow more-traditional approaches, meaning that Scrum adoption is limited to the development team. That team is presented with a detailed project plan and a set of requirements that it then works through, incrementally delivering software (but not to production) as the production release process runs at a different cadence.

While this model is not inherently bad, application development professionals need to carefully consider and make the right decisions about where the lines fall between water-Scrum and Scrum-fall. Otherwise, they are unlikely to realize agile’s business benefits, such as faster time-to-market, increased business value, and improved flexibility and responsiveness.

The reality of water-Scrum-fall is that change will continue. The water stage defines the overall direction of the project, but the team will have many insights during the project that challenge initial ideas. By supporting change while at the same time ensuring that the team understands the impact of that change, the team will not only build better applications, but will also learn more about its process for future implementations.

Chances are, you’ve likely had some experience with this methodology. If not – and you’re looking to adopt an agile-esque approach – here’s a tip from eBay’s Jon Bach:

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Here’s a quick Q&A with Carl Shaulis, QA Engineering Manager at HomeAway.com. Carl has been testing software for 10+ years and has over 15 years of management experience. Here, Carl explains his presentation on Testing in the World of Kanban.

Want to see more interviews from STPCon? Check out the full list here.

Next up in our video interview series is Jason Huggins, co-founder and CTO of Sauce Labs, a cloud computing web testing infrastructure service. Jason is the creator of the Selenium project, a cross-platform, cross-browser web automation toolkit. Here, Jason explains the basis of his presentation on Web Testing with Selenium 2.0.

Oh – and did we mention that this video includes a testing robot? Well, now you know!

Want to see more interviews from STPCon? Check out the full list here.

Here’s Julie Davis, Director of QA for Vistaprint, explaining her presentation on Testing Agility without Agile: A Toolkit for Managers.

Want to see more interviews from STPCon? Check out the full list here.

Here we chat with Jane Fraser, Test Director at Electronic Arts. Jane gave a great presentation called Leading from the Middle – Applying Maxwell’s 360 Leader Concepts for Test Leads. Here she is with a quick synopsis:

Want to see more interviews from STPCon? Check out the full list here.

Here’s Eddy Bruin, a native of The Netherlands who has been working as a test consultant within Capgemini from the beginning of 2008. Since then, he has been working for several clients like ING Bank and ING Investment Management. In this video, gives us a sneak-peek on his presentation about mobile app testing.

Want to see more interviews from STPCon? Check out the full list here.

Next up in our STPCon Interviews series is Scott Barber – CTO of PerfTestPlus. Scott is viewed by many as the world’s most prominent thought-leader in the area of software system performance testing and as a respected leader in the more general field of testing software systems. Here he is talking about his presentation:

Want to see more interviews from STPCon? Check out the full list here.

Here’s another short interview, this time with Shawn Hudson, Supervisor of Test Engineers at Sprint. Shawn gave a great presentation on Test Process Improvement Adoption. Here he is with a quick explanation:

Want to see more interviews from STPCon? Check out the full list here.

Next up in our STPCon 2011 video series is Robert Walsh. Rob is the president of Excalibur Solutions, an agile consulting firm. After giving a session titled Adapting Conventional Testing Strategies for an Agile Environment, Rob took a couple of minutes to share his thoughts about how testers can better fit with an agile processes.

Want to see more interviews from STPCon? Check out the full list here.

If you’re in the testing business, chances are you’ve used a bug-tracking system. And if you’ve used a bug-tracking system, there’s a good chance it was Atlassian’s industry-leading product, JIRA. Well, Atlassian OnDemand now takes those same development tools you know and love, including JIRA, into the cloud providing your team with greater affordability, customizability, and connectivity.

On the heels of this news, uTest is happy to announce a new plugin that allows bi-directional integration with JIRA. As one of only fifteen plugins that have been pre-installed on Atlassian OnDemand, we’re obviously quite excited about this news and what it means for our growing base of customers, and our global community of testers.

So what does it mean, specifically? Well, previously, companies could consolidate and track their bugs in JIRA by importing reports logged in uTest’s platform.  But now, JIRA users can map uTest data fields back to data fields in JIRA, which creates a seamless, two-way system for managing bugs found in the lab or in the wild. The end result: a greatly simplified process for test case management.

Perhaps the coolest thing about our new JIRA plugin is its one-click integration with Bug Fix Verification, a robust new time-saving feature launched in Version 4.0 of our software testing platform. Since uTest’s community performs app testing in real-world conditions – working on real devices, carriers, browsers, and operating systems – it can be difficult for customers to validate that a bug fix has addressed the problem.

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