Agile Testing Fellowship

The age-old question: Do testers need to be coders

October 11, 2025

Janet Gregory, Lisa Crispin
Collaboration, Learning and Improvement, quality coaching

We have been asked this question for the last 20 years, and in today’s agile world, does everyone on the team need to be able to code? Many of us have felt the uncertainty of wondering, “Am I technical enough?” We both started our software career...

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collaboration, Learning

Task-switching – can it work?

July 15, 2025

Janet Gregory, Lisa Crispin
Collaboration, Process, quality coaching

There’s plenty of evidence showing the downsides of frequently switching tasks and contexts – search on “task-switching is bad” in your favorite search engine to get an idea. Yet, the reality is that many testing and quality practitioners support...

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collaboration, quality coach, sustainable pace

Testing: A low-level task??

June 16, 2025

Janet Gregory, Lisa Crispin
Holistic Testing, Learning and Improvement, quality coaching, Testing

Several years ago, Janet was asked this question: "The majority of developers don't like testing and quite a few business analysts (BAs) don't like it either. It is considered a low-level task. Any comments? Thoughts?" We are revisited that...

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holistic testing, Learning, testing

Who does the 'validation'?

April 29, 2025

Janet Gregory, Lisa Crispin
Collaboration, Learning and Improvement, Visualization

A few years ago, Lisa’s team used an online tracking tool to visualize and manage their work. The team practiced kanban, though they had regular work sessions such as story readiness workshops and retrospectives on a two-week iteration schedule. ...

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collaboration, sustainable pace, testing

Quality Attributes – those pesky “non-functional” requirements

March 17, 2025

Janet Gregory, Lisa Crispin
Collaboration, Holistic Testing, Testing

We commonly hear people talking about “non-functional” requirements. By “non-functional”, they mean quality attributes such as performance, security, accessibility, usability, operability, installability, the list goes on and on. However, we beli...

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holistic testing, quality, test design, testing

User Acceptance Testing (UAT)

January 12, 2025

Janet Gregory, Lisa Crispin
Collaboration, Holistic Testing, Testing

A question we get once in a while (though less often than in the past), is about UAT (user acceptance testing). People wonder how it fit into an agile cadence – especially when the feature spans more than one or two iterations. User Acce...

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collaboration, testing

Service Level Language

October 21, 2024

Janet Gregory, Lisa Crispin
Holistic Testing, Process, Quality

Service level language is a way an organization can set targets for different aspects of product quality, especially areas like availability and performance. Both of us have worked in organizations that have used SLAs (Service-level agreements), ...

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DevOps, measure

Go / No Go! Who decides?

August 21, 2024

Janet Gregory, Lisa Crispin
Collaboration, Process, Quality

Back in the exciting internet startup days of the late ‘90s, Lisa had the title of “Quality Boss” at the travel website startup where she worked. She held the keys to production. She decided when the release candidate was good enough to release a...

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collaboration, Learning, measure, quality

Fostering collaboration with ensemble testing

July 02, 2024

Janet Gregory
Collaboration

In our Holistic Testing courses, we talk a lot about the importance of collaboration. If your organization has more of a solo work culture, it can be hard to encourage more collaborative practices such as pairing and working in an ensemble (the n...

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collaboration, Learning, testing

Sharing ideas to spark conversations

April 29, 2024

Janet Gregory, Lisa Crispin
Collaboration, Learning and Improvement, Visualization

When we work in isolation, we risk losing the best part of an idea. By sharing our ideas – even the half-baked ones – we can spark conversations that grow them into something valuable for ourselves and our community. We’ve heard from leading prac...

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collaboration, sharing

Flaky tests

March 20, 2024

Janet Gregory, Lisa Crispin
Test Automation

We’re not sure if you started singing along with Marit, but we certainly did. This tweet captured the essence of what we think about flaky (sometimes spelled flakey) tests. What are “flaky tests”? To us, flaky tests are ones t...

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automation, continuous integration, flaky tests

Quality Coaches

February 26, 2024

Janet Gregory, Lisa Crispin
quality coaching

In the last few years, we’ve been hearing “buzz” about quality coaches. Everyone seems to have their own take on the subject, and we’ll share some links from others expressing their opinions. As testers/quality advocates, we care about the qua...

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Learning, quality, quality coach

Meet our instructors: Gáspár Nagy

January 17, 2024

Lisa Crispin
Holistic Testing

This is the second in our series introducing some of the highly experienced practitioners who teach our Holistic Testing courses. Some of you are already familiar with Gáspár Nagy. Janet and Lisa had the good fortune to meet Gáspár at testing con...

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holistic testing, Learning, instructors

Success Factor #1: The Whole Team Approach

January 11, 2024

Janet Gregory, Lisa Crispin
Agile, Collaboration

What a great way to start off the new year talking about the number one success factor from Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams - the Whole Team. That’s it… the number one factor in being successful with testing and quali...

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collaboration, holistic testing

Success Factor #2: Adopt an agile mindset

November 30, 2023

Janet Gregory, Lisa Crispin
Holistic Testing

In our series on the 7 key factors for agile and holistic testing success, we’ve worked our way up to number 2: Adopt an agile testing mindset. In our global testing community, some people do not know what we mean by ‘mindset’. It’s all about att...

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success factors

Meet our instructors: Prathan Dansakulcharoenkit

November 28, 2023

Lisa Crispin
Holistic Testing

Meet the Agile Testing Fellowship instructors - a blog post series! Janet Gregory, Lisa Crispin and José Diaz co-founded the Agile Testing Fellowship to help teams and practitioners around the world learn to succeed with testing in agile...

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holistic testing

Success Factor #3: Automation

October 19, 2023

Janet Gregory, Lisa Crispin
Holistic Testing, Testing

Moving up the list in our series of blog posts about key success factors for agile testing, we get to automation as # 3. We include automation in testing as one of our success factors because we believe you cannot deliver changes frequently, at a...

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automation, collaboration, success factors

Provide and Obtain Feedback - Success Factor #4

August 30, 2023

Janet Gregory, Lisa Crispin
Collaboration, Visualization

This month, we’re continuing our exploration of the seven success factors with #4 – Provide and obtain feedback. Our 2009 Agile Testing book includes a sidebar by Bret Pettichord about the importance of feedback. He summarized: “Agile practic...

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collaboration, success factors

Figuring out the next steps in your team's quality journey with QPAM

August 16, 2023

Janet Gregory, Lisa Crispin
Learning and Improvement, Quality

Since you’re reading this blog post, we hope you and your team are getting engaged in testing activities throughout the holistic testing loop. (And if you aren’t familiar with it yet, please check out our posts on the holistic testing model.) We ...

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quality, QPAM

Build a foundation of core practices: Success Factor #5:

July 19, 2023

Janet Gregory, Lisa Crispin
Process, Testing

In 2009 when we published Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams, the fifth success factor in our list was “Build a foundation of core practices”. While every team should adopt practices that work for its situation, a team w...

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success factors, testing

Collaborate with Customers: Success factor #6

May 18, 2023

Janet Gregory, Lisa Crispin
Collaboration, Quality

As we mentioned last month, we’re doing a series based on our seven success factors from our first book, Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams. We’re bringing in some new experiences and showing why we still think they are ...

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collaboration, quality, success factors

The power of conferences

May 04, 2023

Janet Gregory, Lisa Crispin
Learning and Improvement

NOTE: This post is a special edition copied from our May 2023 newsletter. Normally our newsletters contain content that is exclusively for our subscribers. We had a special request to make this issue available to a wider audience so we are making...

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Learning

Don't forget the big picture

April 12, 2023

Janet Gregory, Lisa Crispin
Holistic Testing, Testing

We’ve decided we are going to do a series based on our seven success factors from our first book Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams. We’ll bring in some new experiences and show why we still think they are important and ...

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holistic testing, quality, success factors, testing

Visualizing quality, Part 2: Mitigating risks

February 28, 2023

Janet Gregory, Lisa Crispin
Collaboration, Testing, Visualization

Let’s look at a couple of visualizations that help teams identify and mitigate risk. In last month’s blog post, we described Rob Meaney’s visual for making problems visible and sparking discussions about them. Rob has another useful model that hi...

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collaboration, quality, sharing, testing

Visualizing quality, Part 1: Making problems visible

January 30, 2023

Janet Gregory, Lisa Crispin
Process, Visualization

We find so much benefit in visual models to help us think about agile testing and spur conversations with our team. Over the years, we have come across many, that have helped us have a conversation with our teams. In Part One of this two-part blo...

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collaboration, Learning, quality

Quality - Different Perspectives

January 03, 2023

Janet Gregory, Lisa Crispin
Process, Quality

Over the years Janet has done many talks and keynotes about quality, and what it means – from a process perspective as well as a product perspective. Often, teams and organizations think about quality with a very narrow view. Jerry Weinberg de...

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measure, quality

Sustainable Pace

October 20, 2022

Janet Gregory, Lisa Crispin
Agile, Process

To paraphrase Elisabeth Hendrickson’s “agile acid test”, modern software development is about delivering small chunks of value to customers frequently, at a sustainable pace. That “sustainable pace” encompasses all the good development practices ...

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collaboration, sustainable pace

Measuring to improve quality

August 10, 2022

Janet Gregory, Lisa Crispin
Holistic Testing, Process, Quality

Quality is hard to define and hard to measure in a meaningful way. And there are many aspects of quality. Process quality is about how well a team creates and delivers their product. Product quality is what the customer cares about. It’s all impo...

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measure, quality

Learning and Adapting in the Holistic Testing Model

July 01, 2022

Janet Gregory, Lisa Crispin
Collaboration, Holistic Testing

Agile teams continually learn and apply those learnings to adapt their product and process. There’s often a tendency for teams to release a new feature and then move on to building the next new feature. This means missing a huge opportunity to le...

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holistic testing, Learning

The difference between monitoring and observability

May 23, 2022

Janet Gregory, Lisa Crispin
DevOps, Holistic Testing, Visualization

We’ve had people ask us, “Is observability really about monitoring”, so we decided that was a good topic for this month. This goes along with our previous blog posts about the different stages in the holistic testing model and how testing fits in...

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holistic testing, testing

Build quality in with shared understanding, using the Holistic Testing model

April 09, 2022

Janet Gregory, Lisa Crispin
Collaboration, Holistic Testing

In June, July and August of 2021, our blog posts were about engaging the whole team early in the discover and planning stages of the loop. We had several suggestions for practices that can help uncover hidden assumptions. In this blog post, w...

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collaboration, holistic testing, quality, sharing

Holistic testing: What it means for agile teams

February 26, 2022

Janet Gregory, Lisa Crispin
Collaboration, Testing, Visualization

Since Janet introduced her holistic testing model, we’ve had several practitioners tell us, “This describes what we do so well! Thank you for explaining this – I can use this model to explain to others!” This approach resonates with people on tea...

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holistic testing, quality, testing

Testing in DevOps

January 08, 2022

Janet Gregory, Lisa Crispin
DevOps, Testing

Testing is the heart of DevOps. In our last blog post, we talked about DevOps – vocabulary, building relationships, and the deployment pipeline. This month we get more into the testing aspect of DevOps. Test automation is a big part of being ...

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holistic testing, testing

Demystifying DevOps

November 29, 2021

Janet Gregory, Lisa Crispin
Collaboration, DevOps, Visualization

Every time we think that something is common, we realize that there are many misconceptions about a term – such as DevOps. It sounds like it's shutting out testing, and discussions about it often involve only the technological aspects like ...

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collaboration, DevOps, testing

Asking for help

September 16, 2021

Janet Gregory, Lisa Crispin
Collaboration

Opening the hood The story starts with Janet at a Studebaker meet… for those who don’t know what a Studebaker is, it’s an antique car, and her husband Jack, has a ’62 GT Hawk (picture below). During the meet, they took part in a ru...

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collaboration, sharing

Explore more than your software

August 12, 2021

Janet Gregory, Lisa Crispin
Collaboration, Testing, Visualization

Last month, we talked about visualizing dependencies. This month we want to go into more detail about using exploratory test techniques for more than exploring your new features in your product. In her book, Explore It! Elisabeth He...

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collaboration, testing

Visualizing Dependencies

July 21, 2021

Janet Gregory, Lisa Crispin
Collaboration, Testing, Visualization

Last month, we started talking about testing early: identifying assumptions and risks, creating testable stories using flow diagrams. There are many other types of visualizing tools such as state diagrams, empathy maps or user role maps. Jane...

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collaboration, holistic testing

Engage the Whole Team Early!

June 24, 2021

Janet Gregory, Lisa Crispin
Collaboration, Testing

We’re going to use Janet’s latest model about holistic testing, to talk about specific practices that we use in different stages of the lifecycle. In this post, we extract the left top part of the infinite loop, and talk about testing early ...

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collaboration, holistic testing, testing

Testers as Consultants

May 19, 2021

Janet Gregory, Lisa Crispin
Collaboration, Testing

Over the years, we’ve given talks and listened to others talk about the subject of testers being coaches or consultants. We believe there is a difference between the two. A coach works with a single person, or a team, helping them t...

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collaboration, sharing

Share your stories!

April 22, 2021

Janet Gregory, Lisa Crispin
Collaboration

Janet has taught our agile testing course all over the world. Although she has a timeline and knows approximately how much time each section should take, Janet finds that most classes don’t stick to the same times. Each class is different b...

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collaboration, sharing

Face to Face Collaboration

March 19, 2021

Janet Gregory, Lisa Crispin
Collaboration

Our last blog post was about the importance of asking questions when moving towards continuous delivery environment. Asking questions is important, but sometimes how you ask them is equally important. Janet shared one experience in a blog pos...

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holistic testing, collaboration

Ask questions for understanding!

January 25, 2021

Janet Gregory, Lisa Crispin
Testing

Welcome to our first Agile Testing Fellowship blog post! Here we will share ideas from us (Janet and Lisa), instructors as well as featured guests. We hope to have a wide variety of topics that will interest you. We decided to kick of this site w...

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holistic testing, quality

Janet Gregory
Lisa Crispin

automation
collaboration
continuous integration
DevOps
flaky tests
holistic testing
instructors
Learning
measure
QPAM
quality
quality coach
sharing
success factors
sustainable pace
test design
testing

Everyone has something valuable to share

The age-old question: Do testers need to be coders

Task-switching – can it work?

Testing: A low-level task??

Who does the 'validation'?

Quality Attributes – those pesky “non-functional” requirements

User Acceptance Testing (UAT)

Service Level Language

Go / No Go! Who decides?

Fostering collaboration with ensemble testing

Sharing ideas to spark conversations

Flaky tests

Quality Coaches

Meet our instructors: Gáspár Nagy

Success Factor #1: The Whole Team Approach

Success Factor #2: Adopt an agile mindset

Meet our instructors: Prathan Dansakulcharoenkit

Success Factor #3: Automation

Provide and Obtain Feedback - Success Factor #4

Figuring out the next steps in your team's quality journey with QPAM

Build a foundation of core practices: Success Factor #5:

Collaborate with Customers: Success factor #6

The power of conferences

Don't forget the big picture

Visualizing quality, Part 2: Mitigating risks

Visualizing quality, Part 1: Making problems visible

Quality - Different Perspectives

Sustainable Pace

Measuring to improve quality

Learning and Adapting in the Holistic Testing Model

The difference between monitoring and observability

Build quality in with shared understanding, using the Holistic Testing model

Holistic testing: What it means for agile teams

Testing in DevOps

Demystifying DevOps

Asking for help

Explore more than your software

Visualizing Dependencies

Engage the Whole Team Early!

Testers as Consultants

Share your stories!

Face to Face Collaboration

More questions testers can ask about delivering features

Ask questions for understanding!

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