Each organization involved in creating software eventually has a need to deliver that software. It is what we call the software delivery process. Typically, software delivery starts at the moment that a developer has written code locally and wants to publish it. Or, as Martin Fowler puts it: From the developer finishing the feature to getting that feature into production. At Qxperts, we have a more holistic view on software delivery.

Due to corona should use video conferencing tools while doing Planning Poker. Which tool can you use the best to collaboratively determine our estimates? So we are prepared for the next Sprint Planning in Scrum.

Why you should you keep doing Planning Poker?

You’d like to keep doing this, because this Refinement practice naturally raises:

1. The teams awareness what work is expected and get clarification.
2. Knowledge and tactics will be shared
3. Assumptions will become clear
4. Negotiation with the Product Owner will occur to keep it small AND valuable

Which Planning Poker tool to use online in video conferencing?

But which Planning Poker tool would you use in Zoom or Teams? I had a discussion with my Agile coach colleagues within Xebia. We agree analog cards trumps any online tool. Why?

A. First, analog cards are easily made available to anyone. So, no firewall to jump over. And no licenses needed. Just create them!

B. Secondly, if you let them create by the team, this naturally creates ownership and some will introduce some fun and/or improvement. Especially, if any team member could introduce an extra card. Examples I think of are ‘time for an energizer’ or ‘we try to estimate too soon’.

C. Most importantly, it will naturally enforces any team member to put the camera on. Raising opportunities to spot non-verbal signals of anyone. That’s great!

This together comes close to mirror the office situation. And as an advantage, the screen sharer doesn’t need to switch applications all the time.

See my deck of cards. Easily made of some thick paper and a fat black marker, for instance.

Any questions? Raise them below!

Your potential next step to increase effectiveness:

Would you like to become the best Scrum Master? Join our Advanced Online class

Would you like to deepen your tactics in great Refinement? Join classes like
Specification by examply by Gojko Adzic It is the cornerstone of any successful requirements and testing strategy with Agile and Lean processes, like Scrum, Extreme Programming, and Kanban. This workshop teaches you how to apply SBE to bridge the communication gap between stakeholders and implementation teams, build quality into software from the start, design, develop, and deliver systems fit for purpose.

Make your team stronger. Distribute the workload of testers among time better and become better as a team? Understanding cross functional competences and needs will increase while applying Test Driven Development.

Nowadays, Cypress is rapidly becoming the standard for UI test automation. With cross-browser support being available as per early June 2020, we at Xebia see the traction growing and growing. We’ve recently contributed to this growth by open sourcing a plugin that ensures that Cypress tests can deal with file download dialogs from the browser. In this blog, we explain the background and how we approached it.

Introduction

Automated browser testing is essential for asserting the quality of the code you deliver when developing web applications. Some defects only become visible at the point when you tie everything together in your application. You want to catch these defects as early as possible to minimize the cost of fixing them. There are a lot of great tools out there to help you with this and I would like to highlight a tool named Playwright.

There is a lot of buzz around the practice of Progressive Delivery lately. Rightfully so, as it’s a great addition to continuous delivery. By gradually exposing new versions to a subset of users, you’re further mitigating risks. As usual with new and shiny things, many of us are eager to try it out, learn about the tools and shift to this way of working. But as is also common, there are reasons to do it, reasons to not do it, and reasons you might not succeed at it. Let me save you some trouble by elaborating on a few of them. 

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.