agile

In today’s age of tight deadlines and accelerating delivery cycles of software, test automation is surely favorable for the world of functional testing and critical to the success of big software development companies. But its various benefits have led to unrealistic expectations from managers and organizations. This article highlights the role and use of automation in an agile context and the irreplaceable importance of manual testing.

How do you estimate work you've never done before? One proven method is to spike it: Timebox a little work, do some research—just enough to know how long it will take to finish the rest of the work—and then you can estimate the rest of the work. You don’t waste time, you can explore different avenues of how best to complete the task, and your team learns together.

Chandra Munagavalasa writes that because the requirements change over time, the product backlog is never complete. As the project progresses and more detailed information becomes available, the product backlog items and their rankings change continually. One of the many techniques available for ranking the product backlog is the Kano model.

Using metrics such as cumulative flow to monitor throughput and quantitative thinking may not seem very humanistic, but by depersonalizing the work being done, we can focus our energies on solving actual problems instead of conducting a daily witch-hunt and shaming people into high performance.