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...

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 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...

 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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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. ...