Agile Principles, Team Roles & Kanban Methodology

Agile Manifesto Principles

• A core tenet of Agile is welcoming changing requirements, even late in development to harness change for the customer's competitive advantage.
• Agile is about building projects around motivated individuals, providing a supportive environment, and trusting them to complete the work.
• It is not a principle of the Agile Manifesto to deliver working software after all iterations are completed; instead, deliver working software frequently.
• Agile teams should regularly reflect, tune, and adjust their behavior to become more effective.

Agile Team Roles and Responsibilities

• The Product Owner generates, maintains, and prioritizes the product backlog in Agile.

Kanban Methodology

• Kanban limits parallel active tasks through a work-in-progress (WIP) limit.
• A work-in-progress limit is controlled by the maximum number of tickets allowed for a station and/or globally for the board.

Iteration Planning

• Iteration planning begins after release planning is complete and focuses on the first iteration.
• Iteration planning is forward-looking, focused on the scope of a single iteration, and concerned with the iteration backlog.

Agile User Stories

• User stories capture requirements from the perspectives of developers, testers, and business representatives.

Daily Stand-up Meetings

• In daily stand-up meetings, the team discusses what to do when there are impediments to progress due to delays in test-related activities.
• The team discusses the issue with the tester and attempts to find solutions and help resolve the problem.
• The whole team is responsible for quality in Agile projects.
• The whole team gets together to resolve impediments to progress.

Agile "Whole Team Approach"

• The "Whole Team Approach" involves everyone with the knowledge and skills necessary for project success.
• Whole team means including everyone with the knowledge and skills necessary to ensure project success.
• Testers should work closely with developers and business representatives to achieve desired quality levels.
• The whole team is involved in any consultations where product features are presented, analyzed, or estimated.

Product Demonstrations

• Frequent product demonstrations help an Agile team avoid the risk of the project team heading in the wrong direction.
• Scope creep is an uncontrolled change irrelevant to product demonstrations.
• Frequent demonstrations allow frequent feedback, preventing the team from going in the wrong direction.

Early and Frequent Feedback

• Helps teams understand their capacity in a sprint or iteration.
• Helps the team learn what could accelerate their work.
• Makes the team's capabilities transparent.

INVEST Acronym

• The letter "V" in the INVEST acronym stands for "Valuable."
• If a story does not have discernable value it should not be done.

Agile Retrospectives

• Recurring retrospectives are an Agile technique used to regularly check the effectiveness of the quality process.
• Retrospectives look for the root cause of issues and suggest new approaches to improve quality.
• Avoid blame games during retrospectives.
• Retrospectives are intended for team members to discuss and make small improvements.

Continuous Integration (CI)

• Continuous Integration eliminates schedule risks associated with big-bang integration approaches
• It provides quick feedback on decisions.
• It builds confidence that each day’s developed work is sound.
• CI decreases repetitive manual testing activities.

Pairing in Agile Practice

• Pairing involves testers working together to test a feature.
• It can involve a tester working with a developer to develop and test a feature.
• Two programmers can work together at one workstation, with one writing code and the other reviewing, switching roles frequently.
• Tester should focus on creating automated integration, system, and system integration tests

Agile Tester Tasks

• Testers create, execute, monitor, and maintain automated tests and results.
• Testers also serve as testing and quality coaches, sharing knowledge and supporting quality assurance.

Business-Oriented Work Products

• Quality plans are specific to testers, and not a business-oriented work product.
• Business-oriented work products include the requirements document, user documentations, and workflows.

Agile Project Testing

• A continuous integration framework helps to check for code compilation errors in Agile projects.

Agile Task Boards

• Agile task boards provide a visual representation of the whole team's current status.

Daily Stand-up Meeting Agenda

• Key agenda items include what has been completed since the last meeting, what is planned to complete by the next meeting, and identifying any impediments.

Automated Testing

• Automated testing and build tools help manage regression risk from frequent changes.
• Over-reliance on automated unit testing is a problem.
• Automated tests are required at unit, integration and system level.

Build Verification Tests

• Build verification tests are a subset of automated tests covering critical functionality and integration points.
• These tests are created and run immediately after a new build is deployed to the test environment.

Tester's Role in User Story Analysis

• When requirements are ambiguous during user story analysis, testers should actively acquire information from stakeholders.
• Testers should define testable user stories and acceptance criteria with customer representatives and stakeholders.

Tester's Role in Agile

• In an Agile team, a tester provides feedback on test status, progress, product quality, and process quality.

Tester's Role During Poker Session

• The tester should collaborate with stakeholders to clarify requirements, especially in terms of testability, consistency, and completeness.

Behavior-Driven Development (BDD)

• BDD allows the focus on testing the expected software behavior.
• Test-driven development (TDD) is used to develop code guided by automated test cases.

Test Pyramid

• The test pyramid is based on the testing principle of early QA and testing with the goal of eliminating defects as early as possible in the lifecycle.

Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD)

• ATDD defines acceptance criteria and tests during user story creation.
• ATDD relies on stakeholder participation.
• In ATDD, the entire Agile team creates test cases which can be manual or automated, and the testers execute them.

Quality Risk

• A quality risk refers to situations where the primary effect of risk is on product quality.

Testing Quadrants

• Quadrant Q1 contains unit tests and is unit level, technology facing, and supports the developers.
• Usability testing is located in Q3.
• Performance testing is located in Q4.

Agile Tester Advice

• Testing must respond to change.
• It is important to identify all dependencies between underlying functions and features to enable a continuous testing strategy.

Quality Risk Examples

• Slow response to user input represents a quality risk.
• Delay in creation of User Stories, Delay in verifying environment set up and Misunderstanding between the developer and the tester are project risks.

Fibonacci Sequence

• A Fibonacci sequence is a series of numbers where each number is the sum of the two preceding numbers, e.g., 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13.

Definition of Done (DoD)

• The testing environment needs to be verified before the iteration can start.
• The definition of done can include all features ready and tested, integration of all features tested, and documentation written, reviewed, and approved.

Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD) Characteristics

• ATDD is a test-first approach where test cases are created before implementing the user story and the cases may be manual or automated.
• In ATDD, test cases are created by the Agile team and are created prior to implementing the user story.

ATDD Approach

• In a specification workshop, the user story is analyzed, discussed, and written by developers, testers, and business representatives.
• Tests are expressed so that every stakeholder can understand, with sentences in natural language.

Test Charter

• A test charter guides exploratory testing by providing test conditions to cover during a time-boxed session.

Exploratory Testing Questions

• Questions for exploratory testing may include what is most important to find out about the system, how might the system fail, what should happen when, and are customer needs, requirements, and expectations fulfilled?

Embedded Tester Risks

• The risk of loss of independence and objective evaluation.

Acceptance Test Cases

• Valid acceptance test cases must be between 25 and 40 to clear the exam.