Posts tagged as:

web 2.0

From Waterfall to Agile:7 mistakes you shouldn’t be making.

Past few years software industry has taken up the Agile buzzword in the same league as “2.0″,”social networking”,”cloud computing”.While some of this words are really taken up to attract investors or sound new-agey,Agile has not been abused as much due to it’s inherent back office use nature.However like all good things as the good word spreads it takes new meanings as well as a general incorrect use which has an opposite effect of what’s intended.

Some of the most common mistakes are made when an organization strives to move from the traditional waterfall to an Agile process.Here are some things to watch out for

  • Daily scrums turn into status meeting or long technical design discussions.
  • Daily scrums run longer than 15-20 minutes at the most.
  • Requirements and scheduling still happens at management level and not through team participation
  • The release cycles are not getting shorter.
  • Communication still flows top to bottom instead through team members
  • Teams are still seen in silos and boundaries are not disappearing.
  • Not enough tests that run automatically with every build.

This are just some of the things that you should look for when you are trying to build a true Agile team or process in your organization.Otherwise it would just be another buzz word to make the management feel good about it

Agile is not an easy process to adopt as well transformation of a culture used to the waterfall methodology is even harder.However if done the right way it can bring wonders to your organization and it’s highly satisfactory and rewarding for team members.

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Test Data Management:QA Team’s favorite bugaboo

 

Test Data Management is often an overlooked part of QA team’s effort.Test Data is usually associated with individual testcases,but there are no tools available which makes managing this test data more efficient or more scientific.Increasingly Web 2.0 applications are richer in user data than system data and it’s more important to use production data as often as possible.

Any production issue starts a chain of trying to replicate end user condition,a essential component being the data that user entered or data existing in that’s user’s domain that could have caused an application failure.This should imply that QA team should more often work with production data then fictional testing data..But this change has it’s own challenges like

  • Production data is huge

             QA environments are not well equipped(mainly cost constraint) to handle    production data.In such scenarios QA should have a subset of production data replicated in test environment.QA can offer their expertise in selection of this subset which serves the testing team’s need as well as not overloading the test environment.

  • Cannot expose user data in testing environment

              User data is sensitive and cannot be exposed.Apply scramblers(de sensitizers) which will scramble the data but respect the integrity and type of the data that application understands

  • Database schemas can change often and makes the task of copying production data difficult

             We all know that database schema changes are just around the corner and a mask copy of production data to QA environment will probably fail.This will require making the replication task intelligent enough to understand this and have an option of making those changes while replication is being done

I am sure there must be other issues out there and no single tool  today indiviudally serves the problem of test data management.In next part I will talk more about my wish-list for what such a tool should do

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Enterprise 2.0 and Testing Challenges

What did the OO’s decade give us.It gave us Web 2.0 and with that a new set of challenges for testing those 2.0 applications.So far 2.0 was mainly adopted by small or medium size companies,but enterprises have realized the potential of the community aspect of 2.0 and have started moving towards 2.0.This Mckinsey report(sub reqd) and a peek into your own enterprises future plans will tell you how it’s changing.You might have already started hearing words such as Ajax,Flex from your development side.

First of all what would Enterprise 2.0 change.Well the short answer is everything from corporate culture,best practices,tools and technologies.So what will Testing need to support

1)Collaboration

It’s important that QA collaborates with development,product management more than ever.Collaboration within the QA team also needs to be better than ever.Tools and technologies need to be shared,Common reporting mechanisms need to be implemented.

2)Testing of mashups

Instead of being a standalone application,applications will consist of multiple standalone applications.QA will have to update their processes on how this applications will be tested and testing scenarios will need a rethink keeping this in mind.

3)Agility  for constant changes

Best in class test management and change management will be needed to support the agility through rest of the organization.QA cannot be a bottleneck in supporting agility.Automation is imminent and continuous feedback is important more than ever.Integration with version control/build engine will be absolutely necessary.

4)Lack of clear requirements

The dictum that requirements are frozen will be redundant in 2.0 environment and QA will have to understand the fact that requirements will constantly change getting the software to change.

5)Defect Analysis and Cause Identification

Defects analysis(post defect discovery activity) needs to happen more frequently and cause identified quickly.This will require QA to do their own investigation and supply as much information to the defect as possible.QA will not only have to find defects but also play a pro-active role in identifying the cause as well as possible solutions.

6)Rapid release cycles with overall reduced time to market

In addition the testing team will have to deal with the fact that testing environment will be distributed and community driven.QA teams would be global and roles would be fuzzy.QA organizations will have to adapt to this changing environment and also have their tools of trade(test management,defect tracking) updated to reflect this changes.

It would be interesting to know if your organization is already seeing/facing the issues and what are the changes that your QA organization making to adapt to this change.

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