- [Instructor] Let's talk about tests
that guide development.
Janet, what are some of the things that we might not think
of as tests, but actually do help guide development?
- Well there's actually quite of few of them.
One of my favorites is getting up and doing a whiteboard.
Maybe a mind map.
Because you can start testing the mind map.
You're starting to get our ideas out there.
A flow diagram is something that I use quite often as well.
Just to kind of start showing about
what does the process look?
That challenges people's ideas
because quite often I've had people go,
well that's not the way it works, what about this?
So there's lots of different ways that we can do that.
- Yeah we mentioned earlier that tools they use
in non-agile products can still work in agile.
Flow diagrams are a great example.
On my team our designers often are
in on the beginning of every feature.
And they'll just start
with simple hand-drawn mockups on paper.
Sometimes they'll just talk to us individually
or post them up on the wall so people come
and take a look at them and really think about them.
So just those simple approaches.
We may not think of them as a test,
but they do help us think
about how we're going to test that feature.
- I was in an iteration planning meeting one time,
and the programmers, there was a couple of programmers
on the whiteboard doing their drawing
and talking about how they thought it should work.
And the product owners, he's nodding.
And I'm looking at it and I just kinda say stop, just stop.
And they looked at me, and I, I can't test that.
You have so many permutations, combinations,
it's impossible to test.
And the room went silent, just silent, it was so much fun.
And then one of the programmers who had been sitting quietly
jumped up to the whiteboard, I love whiteboards,
and started drawing, asked the product owner and said,
"would this solve your problem?"
The product owner said,
"it's much simpler, not nearly as, you know, sexy,
but it's, yeah it'll work."
And he looks at me and he said, "Janet,
can you test this?"
And I said yes, because I can
actually get my hands around this.
So sometimes just asking those questions is a form of test.
- Great.
And like you say, being able to draw on the whiteboard,
or it might be some kind of virtual tool
if you have a distributing team,
that's where the magic happens.
And when your team has domain knowledge,
when you hear the business people
or the product owner talking about what they want,
you realize you could deliver them like 80%
of what they want for 20% of the cost,
and that's an opportunity to share that.
- Right, and I just noticed,
and you may not have noticed but I did,
I have a virtual whiteboard here.
(laughter)
- You can use it anywhere. - I use it all the time.
- Well, next we're gonna talk about tests
that help us critique the product.