Sharing insights at the start of story - testers and developers together
Hi,
I am a Scrum Master and got a team with developers and testers. Agile testing should mean that testers no longer go for finding bugs, but to prevent bugs, with collaboration from the very start of the story. The team members are aware of that, still somehow the usually 'forget' to talk to each other at the start of a story, and real communication only starts when 'things happen' around the story and there is already something to test. This is too late i think.
I try to push them in the direction of granulating stories into small testable tasks, but i still feel that we would need some concrete practice, a ritual that would fire up communication around the story - at the very start.
Backlog refinement is not creative enough and not close enough to the implementations itself, so it is not enough.
Any thoughts?
> i still feel that we would need some concrete practice, a ritual that would
> fire up communication around the story - at the very start.
How about a test-first approach using Behavior Driven Development (BDD)?
Ive been thinking on that, yes, the problem is none of us have ever seen that :)
I tried to poke around a bit, suggesting we should give it a chance, but we feel that having no help at all, we would only misuse it.
> Ive been thinking on that, yes, the problem is
> none of us have ever seen that :)
>
> I tried to poke around a bit, suggesting we
> should give it a chance, but we feel that having
> no help at all, we would only misuse it.
Why not start off with 1 or 2 BDD test cases, and determine as a team to learn from the experience and to improve coverage further. It isn't a matter of "poking around" and "giving it a chance". The Scrum Values include commitment, focus, and courage...and BDD has nothing to prove to you. It will only ever be what you make of it.
It will only ever be what you make of it.
There is the problem. The fear is that with zero experience we wont be able to make any good for it. But thank you for the suggestion, it actually would help us I think and we should start doing it.
Posted By Zoltan Dosa on 16 Mar 2016 11:20 AM
Backlog refinement is not creative enough and not close enough to the implementations itself, so it is not enough.
Perhaps you have identified an impediment to quality? Your team should not be glossing over at a high level the stories you intend to make available to be offered to your team. Your team should also refrain from accepting the status quo without looking at ways to improve.
A few practices that may help you:
1) Place a greater emphasis around acceptance criteria for a story
2) Try to use the "Given...When...Then..." structure for your acceptance criteria
3) Involve your testing team members when you are grooming the story and creating the acceptance criteria, not after the story has already been accepted into the sprint.
One of the teams that I am coaching had the same problem: Communiaction between testers and developers happened too late. In a retrospective the team members came up with the idea to have a sync meeting (dev-test) for each user story at the very begginning of the sprint. To remind themselves they write a taskcard for every user story and put it on the board. Best case it is moved into "work" the first day of the sprint.
That's the first step towards TDD/BDD, so you could give it a try. I mean if the testers know what to test they can start writing the test...