Welcome to my second blog in the series of five quality patterns in Agile development that can help you to deliver the right software with great quality. In my previous blog, I’ve introduced Example Mapping as a method to get to specific examples for scenarios or rules that your user story is made up of. The output of the refinement sessions are your requirements and thus your tests. In this blog, we will take a further look at these test cases and why it is important to automate these acceptance tests. Not just from a development team perspective, but also what they can bring to your business.

This is the first blog in the series after my last week’s introduction to the five quality patterns in Agile development, to deliver the right software with great quality. This blog is about a pattern that I think is absolutely necessary for a team to accelerate, deliver with quality and keep on doing this over time as an application expands. Your acceptance criteria should be your tests. That sounds simple enough, but it’s often not the case. By changing the way you refine stories your acceptance criteria can become your tests as well. Let me guide you through it.

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In this blog series, I’ll discuss five quality patterns in Agile development to deliver the right software with great quality.

For years now companies have been adopting Agile ways of working and mostly the Scrum framework as their way to develop software. Scrum is all about working in dedicated teams on small increments of working software. Software that can potentially be released every single sprint. I’m sure you agree with me that this means that this software is therefore always tested every sprint as well. How could we otherwise release it right? This blog is about a trend I have noticed in a lot of companies that after time teams have more and more issues delivering quality software that conforms to business requirements.

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When I’m joining new teams at clients it often becomes clear that the added value of refinements is not always seen. Team members complain that hours are wasted. The refinement sessions shouldn’t be long draining meetings with endless discussions. Refinements should instead provide a clear added value in the form of requirements that the whole team can work with to deliver added value. How do you shape your refinements in a way that they add value? Read on to see how BDD / Specification by Example can help you!

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Cypress focusses on writing front-end tests for web applications. Cypress can verify the contents and functionality of your application, but it cannot pixel-by-pixel tell if all things rendered as expected. For some visually complex components, in our case graphs, visual regression testing is something we need as well.
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Recently Guerrilla Games launched its newest and first open world game: Horizon: Zero Dawn. This got us thinking. Is game testing any different than testing ‘regular’ software? Together with Ana Barbuta, QA Manager at Guerrilla Games, we held a Meetup to find the answer to this question. In this blog post, we reflect shortly on how we look at testing in general and how this view fits with what we’ve learned about testing games.

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Maybe you’ve already read the diary of one of our mBots, if not I encourage you to do so first! So, what was this day all about? How did we come to organise this and what did the participants learn?

Changing teams

As companies decide to adopt a more agile way of working, they also start to form multidisciplinary scrum teams. However, there still is a big challenge. When you work with several disciplines in your scrum team, you are exposed to the risk that you still create mini-handovers. First the business analyst will make the design, the developer(s) will build it, the testers will test it and if you’re lucky the business is happy in the end. Team members tend to keep doing what they’ve always been doing. Nothing really changed! Of course, we cannot realistically expect that the business suddenly starts programming, but it would be great if they know the difficulties that developers cope with. It works the same the other way around. We need to learn from each other and bring our work closer together.Read more →