Get High Performance out of Your Testing Team

Testing is often looked upon by many as an unmanageable, unpredictable, unorganized practice with little structure. It is common to hear questions or complaints from development including: What are test teams doing? Testing takes too long Testers have negative attitudes

Agile Retrospectives

Continuous Improvement and Short Feedback loops (think: Test Driven Development; Sprint Demo/Review; …) are at the core of any Agile process. Without a structured improvement process it can be difficult for teams to improve and without improvement we stagnate. For methods like Scrum, XP and et al., Retrospectives are that tool.

Timeout with Evangeline Mitchell

Following highly sought out native-English speakers for teachers in Asia, are Filipinos. They’re strong presence in the US medical profession as hardworking and professional employees stand in equal measure within English teaching courses in developing countries. In the Philippines, English is the medium in which all courses are taught from the sciences to the humanities. …

Book Review: How We Test at Microsoft

I’ve been intending to write a book review of How We Test Software At Microsoft, by Alan Page, Ken Johnston, and Bj Rollison, but for whatever reason I just never found the time, until now. In general, I like this book a lot. It’s a nice blend of the tactical and the strategic, of the …

Spotlight Interview with Mark Levison

Mark Levison has over twenty years experience in the IT industry, working as a developer, manager, technical lead, architect, and consultant. He discovered Agile in 2001 and is now a Certified Scrum Trainer and Agile Coach with Agile Pain Relief Consulting. Levison has introduced Scrum, Lean and other Agile methods to a number of organizations and coaches from …

Book Excerpt: The Agile Samurai

Author Jonathan Rasmusson explains in his latest book how to successfully set-up, execute and deliver Agile projects. Download the excerpt below for “Chapter 7: Estimation The Fine Art of Guessing.” To read his interview in last month’s issue, please click on “Spotlight Interview: Jonathan Rasmusson” to read his views on the best practices for test …

Same or Different? Retrospectives and Post-Mortems

Let’s look at a few distinctions between the two process improvement practices that make all the difference in their usefulness for making projects and job situations better! An extreme way to look at the goals of these practices is: what makes your work easier (retrospective) versus what did someone else decide is best practice (post-mortem)? …