Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams

When teams use an electronic medium for keeping track of stories, there is a tendency to forget the story board. Janet finds that having both may seem like a duplication of effort, but the visibility of progress to the team far outweighs the extra overhead of writing up the task cards and moving them as they are completed. Having the story board gives your team focus during the stand-ups or when you are talking to someone outside the team about your progress.

Testers Facilitate Communication

Testers can help keep the iteration progressing smoothly by helping make sure everyone is communicating enough. Talk to programmers when they start working on a story, and make sure they understand it. Lisa finds that she can write all of the tests and examples she wants on the team wiki, but if nobody bothers to read them, they don’t help. When in doubt, she goes over requirements and tests with the programmer who picks up the task cards.

Programmers will always have questions as they develop a story, even if they understand the business and the story well. It’s best if a customer is available to answer questions, because that is the most direct communication. Testers shouldn’t get in the way of that; however, we’ve observed that business experts sometimes have trouble explaining a requirement, or a programmer simply gets the wrong idea and can’t get on the same page with the customer. The Power of Three applies here. Testers can help customers and programmers find a common language.

A Little Friendly Competition

Gerard Meszaros, well-known agile coach and author of xUnit Test Patterns [2007], shared this story about a team he was working with and how a game solved a communication issue.

We were having trouble getting the developers to talk to the business people about their assumptions. When they did talk, the tester often got left out of the loop. The tester would sometimes discuss something with the business but never pass it on to the developer. Our project manager, Janice, decided to try to change the behavior through friendly competition.

All of the developers were given blue poker chips with a “D” written on them. All of the testers got a red chip with a “T” on them, and the business people got yellow chips with a “B” on them. Whenever someone met with a counterpart from another area, he or she could exchange one chip with each person. The goal was to get the most complete sets of chips: T-B-D. The winner got a custom-made T-B-D trophy decorated with the three kinds of chips. The end result was that everyone was much keener to meet with each other because they would get more chips!

Find creative ways to get the business experts and programmers to talk and agree upon requirements. If a poker chip game gets them talking, embrace it.

Facilitating communication usually involves drawing on a whiteboard, mocking up interfaces, listing other areas that might be affected, or working through real examples. Whenever communication appears to reach a dead end, or confusion is rampant, ask for a new example and focus on that.

Lisa’s Story

When retirement plan participants want to withdraw money from their accounts, many complex vesting rules and government regulations come into play. It gets worse if the participant has withdrawn money in the past. Working on a story to calculate a participant’s vested balance, my team members all had different ideas on the correct algorithm, even though the product owner had worked through several examples at the beginning of the iteration. My fellow tester, Mike, asked the product owner to work through a new example, and several programmers and testers joined the session. It took a couple of rather tortuous hours of writing numbers and flowcharts on a whiteboard, but eventually they arrived at the correct formula, and everyone was on the same page.

—Lisa

Work through as many examples as you need until the team understands enough different aspects of the system. Try a different format if it’s not working. For example, if pictures drawn on the whiteboard aren’t sufficient to understand the story, try spreadsheets or some other format that’s familiar to the business experts.

Distributed Teams

As we’ve noted in other chapters, having team members in different locations and different time zones means you have to work harder at communication. Phones, email, and instant messaging form the basics of communication, but better collaboration tools are developed all the time.

Chapter 9, “Toolkit for Business-Facing Tests that Support the Team,” talks about some tools that can help distributed teams

Lisa’s Story