I attended Agile Testing Alliance Global Gathering 2014 today and it was a great experience. The sessions were good covering a breadth of topics. I was particularly delighted with a session by Krishna Kumar Sure on “Testing in Agile: Anti Patterns and Remedies” and blogging about it here.
Some of the highlights of the session:
1) The format of the session was extremely easy to follow with KK talking about Agile’s guiding principles at the beginning and going over each anti-pattern pointing out the Agile principles that it breaks.
2) The anti-patterns are delivered in the form of stories with each story as a famous day-to-day expression like “it works on my machine”, “I found 80 defects this week”, “why didn’t you find that bug”.
3) Each anti-pattern started with a pic of his team with very interesting expressions caught on camera. Good job photographers! KK, why did you not tell us about these pics before, we could have lent our faces too!
4) I felt KK used just the right choice of words, neither high-sounding nor bland, like he refers to “test automation being treated as specialization as a ‘mental barrier’”.
5) This one gets the cake. KK generalizes all the anti-patterns to agile teams adopting Agile the easy way rather than the right way. Of course, its because agile teams are made of us and we tend to take the easy path out, mostly. ( I cannot stop quoting an old saying “There are two ways to do a thing, the easy way and the right way” )