Agile

Resources about agile, lean, and everything in between.

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Pre-mortems, steering clear of the rocks.

Are you worried your new project won’t be successful? Or afraid getting stuck applying these new techniques you just learned in a training? Or are you perhaps part of a very pro-active organization, but is a lack of focus crushing all new initiatives in the long run? At Xebia we help customers as consultants, but […] The post Pre-mortems, steering clear of the rocks. appeared first on Xebia Blog. [...]

Bliki: ExploratoryTesting

Exploratory testing is a style of testing that emphasizes a rapid cycle of learning, test design, and test execution. Rather than trying to verify that the software conforms to a pre-written test script, exploratory testing explores the characteristics of the software, raising discoveries that will then be classified as reasonable behavior or failures. The exploratory testing mindset is a contrast to that of scripted testing. In scripted testing, test designers create a script of tests, where ea [...]

Swift Videos

I have recently started creating and sharing videos on the Swift programming language on youtube. If you are an iOS developer, are looking to get into mobile development, check them out and level up in Swift. My latest is a video on Swift enums and tuples. What are they, how to they work, and why […] [...]

Bliki: WaterfallProcess

In the software world, “waterfall” is commonly used to describe a style of software process, one that contrasts with the ideas of iterative, or agile styles. Like many well-known terms in software it's meaning is ill-defined and origins are obscure - but I find its essential theme is breaking down a large effort into phases based on activity. It's not clear how the word “waterfall” became so prevalent, but most people base its origin on a paper by Winston Royce, in particular this figu [...]

Epic Focus: Measure your way to a better time to market

There are several recurring wishes our clients bring to us, one of which is speed, to improve time to market. However, there is no dial that we can turn to deliver value faster. Software teams are not like cars; there’s no accelerator pedal. Even if we try to speed up by adding more resources, in […] The post Epic Focus: Measure your way to a better time to market appeared first on Xebia Blog. [...]

Focus on what was “Done” during Sprint Review

As Scrum Trainer I get to meet a lot of teams and hear of many different ways to do Scrum. Most are valid ways, yet some seem more aligned with the values of Scrum or the purpose of the specific Scrum Element. In this post we’ll have a look at the Sprint Review. The Sprint […] The post Focus on what was “Done” during Sprint Review appeared first on Xebia Blog. [...]

Agile Without Dedicated QA

04 Nov 2019 James Shore/In-the-News In the early days of Agile, methods such as Extreme Programming advocated for shipping without a QA phase. In fact, they often didn’t have dedicated testers—or even bug-tracking systems. And yet there are stories of these teams producing an order of magnitude fewer defects than normal. What did these teams do, and why did it work? And what role does that leave for QA? In an age where Agile is interpreted to mean “sprints” and “story points,” the technical side [...]

Thinking In Tests

04 Nov 2019 James Shore/In-the-News Assert(js) is a conference about testing. Specifically, automated testing. But why bother? Why have automated testing? In my short and sweet keynote session, I looked at what you get and what comes next. [...]

December 12-13 in Melbourne, Australia: Evolutionary Design Animated (Talk)

04 Nov 2019 James Shore/Calendar I’m speaking about evolutionary design at the YOW! Melbourne conference taking place in Australia on December 12th and 13th. I’m putting a huge amount of effort into this one, so it should be something pretty special. Modern software development welcomes changing requirements, even late in the process, but how can we write our software so that those changes don’t create a mess? Evolutionary design is the key. It’s a technique that emerges from Extreme Programming [...]

December 11th in Melbourne, Australia: Faster, More Effective Test-Driven Development (Training)

04 Nov 2019 James Shore/Calendar I’m offering a day of training before the YOW! Melbourne conference in Australia on December 11th: Are your tests slow and brittle? Do you get a sinking feeling when you need to refactor? Do you worry that your unit tests aren’t actually testing anything important? If so, you could benefit from writing tests that don’t use mock objects. In this workshop, you’ll use Node.js to explore a cutting-edge approach to test-driven development (TDD) that doesn’t need mocks [...]