- So let's talk about some ways
we can reduce the time it takes to complete the end game.
One of the things that I like to do is use retrospectives,
and we mentioned that before, is to say,
"What were some of the problems, and how did we do that?"
Lisa, I know that you have at least
one story to contribute to this.
- Many, many stories, but this is
the most recent story on my team.
We really would like to go to
a daily delivery to production, and currently,
our manual regression checking that we have
tens of thousands of automated tests,
we still have a lot of checklists
to go through manually at the end,
and that could take us anywhere from 45 minutes
to longer if we find some problems,
and we don't want to do that every day,
so we took a step back and thought about
what risks do we want to make sure that we cover,
we drew our architecture on a whiteboard,
we started looking at the areas
we thought were the most risky, and we put them
in a spreadsheet and prioritized them,
and we've written stories to make sure
we have automated test coverage for these different things,
so in some cases we might have to write some new tests,
we're using a bit of a different approach,
and in some cases we can still use our old tests,
so we can take advantage of that, but we really turn that
into actual feature development, if you will.
- Okay.
That really makes a lot of sense.
By the way, I really like the way
you use your virtual whiteboard, too.
It makes me feel much better.
So the very first day I walked into this one team,
they had just released to the customer
to do their user acceptance testing.
I walked in and I start asking my questions, and I go,
"So when are we going to get it back
"from the user acceptance testing so that we can
"get it ready to put into production?"
And they said, "Six weeks," and I went, "Six weeks?
"But our release cycle is three months.
"We're going to be halfway through."
It made no sense to me, and so I asked why it took so long.
What the problem was was that the person who was doing
the user acceptance testing was fitting it into
her regular job, and it turned out that she was doing
bits and pieces, because it was her regular job
that she was trying to work around.
Well, I came up with an idea.
We started talking about it in our retrospective,
and I said, "How about," and thankfully,
everybody bought into it, including Julie--
that was our UAT person-- and so, every Friday afternoon,
Julie started coming for an hour, one hour every week,
and she would pair with me, and I would show her
what we had been doing for the week,
so at the end of the next cycle,
when we went to give it to her, she said, "You know what,
"I don't need six weeks, I only need three weeks,"
because she was much more confident, and I went,
"Not good enough, not good enough,"
so we talked a little bit more about it.
What we did was we brought her own desk, her own computer,
and every Friday afternoon, she would come
and she would spend a couple of hours
and test herself what we had been doing.
When we asked her the next release cycle,
how long she needed, her answer was,
"I will take a day off work, put it in our test system,
"and I will finish it by the end of the day,"
the reason being that she had confidence in what it was
because she had been doing it,
so don't wait to the end game.
If you can bring that kind of testing in earlier, please do.
It can make all the difference in the world.
Let's continue with a summary now.
This lesson was about planning for testing.
It's important to understand your context.
How much is enough?
- [Lisa] We talked about models to get the whole team
thinking and provide visuals for our quality attributes
and the testing that we want to get done.
We talked about how the agile testing quadrants
help us think about all different types of testing
beyond just the functional testing that we most likely
are going to think about first,
and we talked about planning release activities early
and doing what's necessary in the end game.
- [Host] Next, we'll take about ways
to build shared understanding through early testing.