Ten years in a field of work I love, it felt as good a time as any to reflect on what brought me to this point. I still remember that feeling the day I finished my last exam at University in May 2006 and realised I needed to try and do something with the knowledge … Continue reading A Decade in Testing – How did I get here?
Category: Agile
Thought I could kill two 'proverbial' birds with one 'proverbial' stone here and document the latest conference I attended while also writing my first post on here in 2 years! It was an early start, the team of us that were going met at the rail station and got the train into London Marylebone. A … Continue reading Lessons Learned from BCS SIGiST Summer 2013 Conference
Heard these phrases before? "How hard can adopting Agile methodology be?" "If I go on a 'Certified Scrum-Master' course, it will all be ok, right?" It is very common for agile to be misunderstood by all levels of user. For a new team, starting to implement agile methodologies can be a daunting job and the … Continue reading Agile Attitude
This post will give an overview of how to make a testing team work effectively alongside a development team during an agile sprint. The first step to ensuring the team works collaboratively is to make sure that all functionality that will be developed within the sprint, is well explained in frequent discussions and that everyone … Continue reading Testing Effectively in an Agile Project
Once a team has completed all their planning, they will then start collaborating to complete user stories and meet the goal set. The daily scrum should be a short meeting where all members get together and should give responses to 3 simple questions: What did you do since the last meeting? What will you be … Continue reading Focused Stand-Ups – Constructive Daily Meetings
One of the major problems that teams trying to adopt agile tend to suffer from is trying to do too much too soon and expecting results instantly. For teams starting out on the agile journey, it is more important to get the basics right which is especially important for teams of a distributed nature. The … Continue reading Buddying Up to Aid Communication!
I'm not claiming to be an expert here but when kicking off a sprint, it is important that everyone in the team is aware of what is needed to be 'successful' in the sprint. When going into the actual planning meeting, the sprint team needs to have: A fully prioritised backlog User-stories which fit into … Continue reading Pre-Planning for a Sprint Planning Meeting
Following another 5.45 start, I managed to arrive at the venue for around 8.30am for the second day of the conference. I spent the first half hour or so before the second keynote speech talking to some of the guys from the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre who were attending the conference in their numbers. Building … Continue reading Lessons Learned from Agile Cambridge 2010 Day 2
Being my first conference for just over 4 years, I was unsure of what to expect. Luckily, the journey was not eventful in anyway and finding the venue was relatively easy. It was great to join other professionals who were working in environments with varied amounts of agile methods being used. I felt that all … Continue reading Lessons Learned from Agile Cambridge 2010 Day 1
Working in an agile environment can be a productive and enjoyable experience, however these experiences always come with challenges. The main challenge that is seen in agile teams in 2010 is surely how to make the process successful with distributed teams. I have been part of Scrum teams with team members in 2 locations in … Continue reading Issues Faced By Distributed Agile Teams
Simon Prior 