Sunday, June 5, 2016

The truth about agile development and scrum

James Whittaker in his book "Exploratory Software Testing" (page 148) stated: "As testers, we must simply get the most work done that we can in the amount of time allotted to us".

Unfortunately, it's very popular to squeeze testing time when deadlines are near.

Years after I drew this cartoon, I worked in a project where we regularly had a burndown chart that looked liked the one below.
Hardly anything was delivered to testers until shortly before the sprint ended. We were thrown a huge bunch of completed tasks over the wall.

You might guess what happened next. Some testers felt the deadline pressure, too, hence probably didn't really accurate testing anymore and simply closed the tasks after a very quick and dirty smoke test (if at all); and all this just just to look great in front of the PM or to however one had to present the results. That's what obviously happened here. Dare those who work with testers who give a shit on deadlines and simply send back for rework all your half-baked features.