Buzz Pressure

If this is your perception of Agile…

And if you’re in the Waterloo, Ontario area, you might want to come out to a Communitech Event on Dec 17.

Are your software projects:
Defect free?  Yes ? No
On-time?  Yes ? No
Under budget?  Yes ? No
Thrilling your users?  Yes ? No

If you answered Yes to all the above questions then congratulations, read no further. If you answered No to one or more then read on.

Since Agile was first introduced in 2001 it has taken the industry by storm. Recent surveys in Dr. Dobb’s Journal (www.ddj.com) have shown that Agile approaches are being adopted in 69% of organizations in North America and that Agile enjoys a significantly higher success rate than traditional projects. In this presentation Scott Ambler will describe what Agile is, address some of the myths that you may have heard, and discuss how Agile will affect your approach to software development. He’ll go beyond the Agile rhetoric surrounding programming and describe how project management, database development, documentation, modeling, user experience, and quality assurance activities are addressed by Agile teams.
Please join us for a complimentary afternoon seminar with Scott Ambler. Scott W. Ambler is the Practice Leader Agile Development at IBM Corporation. Scott is an award-winning author of several books, including books focused on the Unified Process, agile software development, the Unified Modeling language, and CMM-based development. Scott is a regular speaker at international IT conferences and is a contributing editor with Dr. Dobb’s Journal. Scott led the development of several software processes, including Agile Modeling (AM), Agile Data (AD), Enterprise Unified Process (EUP), and Agile Unified Process (AUP) methodologies.

This seminar is produced by eLead.Inc in collaboration with Communitech

You can register here. For free (as in beer)!

The Agile series was pulled together by local Agile mavens Declan Whelan of DP Whelan and Associates and Jeff Berardine of Innosphere with support from Communitech. I helped a bit but not nearly enough — sorry guys!

If you’re practicing Agile and love it, or if you’ve tried an Agile method and hated it, or if you’re just Agile curious please come out and join in the discussion. Heck just come out and hear Scott Ambler.

This morning I participated in an Agile Software Development panel. It was early but even through my fog of only a couple (as in 2) hours of sleep, I think some interesting thoughts and comments surfaced.

One thing that struck me was the discussion about the role of software testing within Agile practices. ‘Typically’ you’d want your testers living side by side with your developers. Even better, you’d want them working with the Product Owner to verify that the story was implemented satisfactorily. There was some discussion/disagreement about the scope that Test Drive Development can realistically cover and the need for formalized acceptance testing. A few people chimed in that although software development practices have evolved, testing/QA/SV practices have failed to keep up to the pace of change.

Around this point, Paul Carvalho (a former senior tester of mine), theorized that we needed to get testers more comfortable with Agile practices like Exploratory Testing (ET) and even more importantly, developers needed to be comfortable with ET. My experience has been that developers’ initial reaction (mine included) to ET is pretty similar to  management’s first reaction to Agile. And while Paul eventually won me over with ET, I would’ve loved the kind comfort of a test plan in the early days.

Paul feels we can overcome the resistance to change through discussion and education but I’m curious -  is Exploratory Testing testing the Agile testing method of choice? What resistance have people felt to implementing Exploratory Testing?