Whose responsibility is testing anyway?

I have a painfully small manual test team, sometimes 1 tester per 15 developers. The answer to the obvious question “who tests?” is “mostly the developers”. Of course this only works if you’re doing extensive automated testing including Specification by Example with a tool such as Cucumber.
Continue reading

When Buckets Go Bad

I use the term Bucket Planning for Release Planning. The metaphor works because buckets overflow if overfilled. There are risks associated with Release buckets corresponding to Minimum Viable Products (MVP). A large MVP bucket has gone bad and a MVP Bucket that continues to grow is a Bucket gone really bad.
Continue reading

Cucumber: Who writes the Gherkin Scenarios

Gherkin, the language used in Cucumber to write tests, is meant to be understandable by folk from the business. I haven’t encountered product owners able to write their own scenarios. And I don’t trust either developers or testers to do it on their behalf. The only people I trust are business analysts trained to write and think Gherkin.
Continue reading

What to do when Scope is Fixed

Sally was a prospective customer of mine. She worked for a high profile but rather old school company and wanted a fixed price contract. Sally genuinely thought her business analysts had nailed down the scope and was confident nothing would change. From her perspective all I had to do was price the work and deliver the product. Sounds perfect except Sally was wrong. My experience is that, fixed price or not, scope is never fixed. Pretending nothing is going to change is a form of self-delusion. Sally was deluded. What should I have done?
Continue reading

Which Gherkin Scenarios go in which Feature File

I believe that you should break the link between Gherkin files and the Epics / User Stories that triggered the Gherkin Scenarios. The Gherkin files should be organised in a way that usefully describes the evolving product. You need to accept that a User Story can affect Scenarios in multiple Gherkin files. Once the User Story is done you can and should forget about it. But the Gherkin Scenarios have a life long after the User Story is gone.

Continue reading

User Story Dependencies are more Apparent than Real

What do I do when a User Story is dependent on another? Well, the most important thing is, to quote the Hitch Hiker’s guide to the Galaxy, “Don’t Panic!”.

I believe dependencies between User Stories are often over played. Sure there are dependencies but often these don’t require any particular management. But even more common are invented dependencies, i.e. dependencies that are more apparent than real. This means dependencies for me are a bit a of requirements smell, i.e. something to be worried about.
Continue reading