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...

In our January blog post, we talked about the importance of asking questions about new features and building shared understanding among the team. Shared understanding should extend beyond feature behavior to other concerns. For example, once we h...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

 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 ...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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 ...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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), ...

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...

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...

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. ...