Another thing to double-check before the iteration is whether your team has all the resources you need to complete any high-risk stories. Do you need any experts who are shared with other projects? For example, you may need a security expert if one of the stories poses a security risk or is for a security feature. If load testing will be done, you may need to have a special tool, or have help from a load testing specialist from another team, or even a vendor who provides load testing services. This is your last chance to plan ahead.
Summary
Your team may or may not need to do any preparation in advance of an iteration. Because priorities change fast in agile development, you don’t want to waste time planning stories that may be postponed. However, if you’re about to implement some new technology, embark on a complex new theme, hope to save time in iteration planning, or your team is divided into different locations, you might find some up-front planning and research to be productive. As a tester, you can do the following:
Chapter 17 Iteration Kickoff
Iteration Planning
Most teams kick off their new iteration with a planning session. This might be preceded by a retrospective, or “lessons learned” session, to look back to see what worked well and what didn’t in the previous iteration. Although the retrospective’s action items or “start, stop, continue” suggestions will affect the iteration that’s about to start, we’ll talk about the retrospective as an end-of-iteration activity in Chapter 19, “Wrap Up the Iteration.”
While planning the work for the iteration, the development team discusses one story at a time, writing and estimating all of the tasks needed to implement that story. If you’ve done some work ahead of time to prepare for the iteration, this planning session will likely go fairly quickly.
Teams new to agile development often need a lot of time for their iteration planning sessions. Iteration planning often took a whole day when Lisa’s team first started out. Now they are done in two or three hours, which includes time for the retrospective. Lisa’s team uses a projector to display user acceptance test cases and conditions of satisfaction from their wiki so that everyone on the team can see them. They also project their online story board tool, where they write the task cards. Another traditional component of their planning meetings is a plate of treats that they take turns providing. Figure 17-1 shows an iteration planning meeting in progress.
Figure 17-1 Iteration planning meeting. Used with permission of Mike Thomas. Copyright 2008.
Learning the Details