Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams

Make sure your team takes at least a little time to pat itself on the back and recognize its achievements. Even small successes deserve a reward. Enjoyment is a vital agile value, and a little motivation helps your team continue on its successful path. For some reason, this can be hard to do. Many agile teams have trouble taking time to celebrate success. Sometimes you’re eager to get going with the next iteration and don’t take time to congratulate yourselves on the previous accomplishments.

Lisa’s team ends an iteration every other Thursday and conducts its retrospective, iteration review, and release the following day. After their meetings conclude, they usually engage in something they call “Friday Fun.” This sometimes consists of playing a silly trivia or board game, going out for a drink, or playing a round of miniature golf. Getting a chance to relax and have a good laugh has a team-building side benefit.

For bigger milestones, such as a big release or achieving a test coverage goal, the whole company has a party to celebrate, bringing in catered food or going out to a restaurant on Friday afternoon. This is a nice reward and recognizes for everyone on both the business and technical teams.

If yours is a new agile team, motivate yourselves by rewarding small accomplishments. Cheer the rising number of unit tests passing in each build. Oooh and aaah over the chart showing actual burn down matching the projected burn down. Ring a bell when the broken unit tests in the build are fixed (okay, that one might be annoying, but recognize it in some way.)

Celebrate your individual successes, too. Congratulate your coworker for completing the project’s first performance test baseline. Give your DBA a gold star for implementing a production back-up system. Give yourself a treat for solving that hard test-automation problem. Bring cookies to your next meeting with the customers. Recognize the programmer who gave you a JavaScript harness that sped up testing of some GUI validations. Use your imagination.

The Shout-Out Shoebox

We love the celebration idea we got from Megan Sumrell, an agile trainer and coach. She shared this with an agile testing Open Space session at Agile 2007.

Celebrating accomplishments is something I am pretty passionate about on teams. On a recent project, we implemented the Shout-Out Shoebox. I took an old shoebox and decorated it. Then, I just cut a slit in the top of the lid so people could put their shout-outs in the box. The box is open to the entire team during the course of the sprint.

Anytime team members want to give a “shout-out” to another team member, they can write it on a card and put it in the box. They can range from someone helping you with a difficult task to someone going above and beyond the call of duty. If you have distributed team members, encourage them to email their shout-outs to your ScrumMaster who can then put them in the box as well.

At the end of our demo, someone from the team gets up and reads all of the cards out of the box. This is even better if you have other stakeholders at your demo. That way, folks on your team are getting public recognition for their work in front of a larger audience. You can also include small give-aways for folks, too.

It may be a cliché, but little things can mean a lot. The Shout-Out Shoebox is a great way to recognize the value different team members contribute.

Taking time to celebrate successes lets your team take a step back, get a fresh perspective, and renew its energy so it can keep improving your product. Give team members a chance to appreciate each other’s contributions. Don’t fall into a routine where everyone has their head down working all the time.

In agile development, we get a chance to stop and get a new perspective at the end of each short iteration. We can make minor course corrections, decide to try out a new test tool, think of better ways to elicit examples from customers, or identify the need for a particular type of testing expertise.

Summary

In this chapter, we looked at some activities to wrap up the iteration or release.

The iteration review is an excellent opportunity to get feedback and input from the customer team.

Retrospectives are a critical practice to help your team improve.

Look at all areas where the team can improve, but focus on one or two at a time.

Find a way to keep improvement items in mind during the iteration.

Celebrate both big and small successes, and recognize the contributions from different roles and activities.

Take advantage of the opportunity after each iteration to identify testing-related obstacles, and think of ways to overcome them.

Chapter 20 Successful Delivery