Qualities of a Good Team Player
The word “team” in Agile Team is hugely important and something we rarely give much thought to. I recently browsed the web to discover and define what really makes a good team player. Part of my personal journey is to improve as a member of my team. I look to these words for inspiration. Coming […]
Austin DevOps Events Summary – Culture is Important
Last week some of our team attended several DevOps Austin related events. We had a great time learning and interacting with other technologists attending both PuppetCamp Austin and DevOps Days Austin. This edition of the annual DevOps Days event in Austin (which also takes place in other cities each year) was declared the biggest. […]
Is Hadoop the right solution?
I noticed some interesting announcements recently concerning the open-source Apache project Hadoop. Firstly, in the last week, both Intel and EMC have announced their own distributions (link). It seems that the big iron hardware vendors are finally coming around to seeing Hadoop as the standard for big data processing. It makes sense for these vendors […]
Podcast Recommendation: The Ruby Rogues
WAIT! Stop Right There!!! I know some of you saw Ruby in the title and are about to move on, but I encourage you to read on. This could be beneficial to you even if you don’t know or don’t care about the Ruby programming language. Podcast Description For those of you who listen to […]
Write Software That Behaves!
Behavior Driven Development Behavior Driven Development is the process of writing high-level scenarios verifying a User Story meets the Acceptance Criteria and the expectations of the stakeholders. The automation behind the scenarios is written to initially fail and then pass once the User Story development is complete. BDD is largely a collaboration tool which forces […]
The Lean Startup Book Review
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries is without a doubt one of the better entrepreneurial books I have read. The book claims to explain “how today’s entrepreneurs use continuous innovation to create radically successful businesses.” The author’s writing is easy to follow, and he uses a lot of real-life examples to help drive his points. […]
Should a Tester Be Afraid to Hear the Word Refactor?
I used to cringe when I heard developers say they were going to refactor some code. To me, as a tester, that meant they were going to change working code and possibly introduce bugs into the software. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right? Why are we refactoring it? Truly, the answer lies in […]
You! Might Be an Agile Tester
You! Might Be an Agile Tester… Here’s my list of 12 reasons you migh be an Agile Tester: If you work in close proximity to Developers, you might be an Agile Tester. If you are test-infected. If you think automated testing is key in software development. If you invite yourself to meetings that you weren’t […]
Maintaining a Healthy Backlog
Our prior post, Evolution of a User Story, provides a better understanding of how a new feature or product transforms from high-level epics to sprint-sized or incremental stories. Let’s zoom out now and focus on how your backlog will be affected while user stories are evolving, grooming sessions are happening, and sprints are in progress. […]
Evolution of a User Story
Many Product Owners we work with find themselves struggling with when and how they should break their epics down into an actionable user story. In this post, we’ll talk more about the “when” portion and how you can get into a regular cadence of evolving your backlog. We will focus mainly on Scrum teams in […]