Presentation Only
Lanette Creamer, Silicon Publishing Inc.
In the past, many development projects had a schedule spanning years. As more companies adopt agile practices, timelines have shortened for many projects. In some areas and industries, projects may be completed in a few months, a few weeks, or even days!
As a practitioner, I blindly leapt into the deep end of the short project pool in 2011. With 2014, rapidly approaching, juggling priorities across multiple short projects has become the new normal for our team. Many automation tools take longer than the entire project to learn to use and set up at a minimal level. Some agile sprints last 3 weeks, but when you have a 6 week project, that starting point is of little use. The lessons learned from testing at Adobe for a decade became habits to unlearn rather than helpful experience. What would you do if, instead of an agile project, you are dealing with many short overlapping projects? Agile principles are still useful for our team, but there are a few guiding truths beyond the Agile Manifesto that can help you apply agile principles when working on more than one project at a time.
In addition to sharing how we work on multiple small projects, Lanette will demonstrate how we use Jenkins, Jing, cloud storage, and Pivotal Tracker to manage our data, files, and progress on each project. The best part? If you want the use most of these tools listed, they are either free, have a free trial, or are very cheap. In the gray area between full-automated checks and fully human driven testing is a rarely explored land of tool assisted testing, mixed with prioritized exploratory testing, What used to be the bleeding edge is becoming the norm of project delivery as agile practices speed up project delivery. If projects are getting shorter where you work, or even if you just want to be more versatile with your test planning, come discuss the world of projects lasting between 3 weeks and 6 months in length. Bring your own questions, stories, or dilemmas for the interactive discussion portions.
