Agile Practices in a Traditional Environment from Markus Gärtner
I put up my slides to my presentation at the Agile Testing Days. It was a very tough talk for me. The first conference presentation I made. Before the presentation I was very nervous, but I had a good feeling afterwards. In addition I realized that I will have to work on my entertaining skills for future presentations. Among the things that I just verbally mentioned during the talk – there was no video taken from the talk – are three more successors of our work. The first one is the outcome that over the course of our work a colleague transitioned from the testing group to the development group as one outcome. Another thing that I mentioned is the fact that I was able to learn Java programming sufficiently enough to contribute to the test framework FitNesse over the course of this year. Third recently I paired with a developer on fixing a bug in the production code. I noted the bug when it was first filed, wrote a failing acceptance test for it, and decided to help the developer with the fix, since I would have been blocked otherwise. I showed him how to rewrite the rather complex if-then-else chain the code showed up with – not covered by fast-feedback unittests – and afterwards we fixed the bug and delivered the fix.
Since I know that it will be hard to understand anything from my rather condensed presentation style format, I also decided to put up the nine pages of paper I wrote. You can find the paper as a pdf here. If you attended my presentation and are looking for more in-depth knowledge of what we did, take a look into it.
The paper walks you through an application of Agile practices in a traditional environment, where a small group of testers used the practices to succeed with converting their automated test cases to a maintainable new automation approach. The bibliography section will also conclude with the book references I gave.
Thanks to Matt Heusser, Gojko Adzic and Mike Scott on the presentation, Lisa Crispin, Brett Schuchert, Stephan Flake and Gregor Gramlich reviewed the paper, thanks to them, too.
