December 2015 Summaries

A triage team plays a crucial role in reviewing bugs as they come in, ensuring that critical issues are prioritized and addressed promptly. Without effective triage, bug tickets can cause delays and invalid fixes, leading to time waste and frustration for the development team. A well-functioned triage team reviews tickets for best practices, assigns severity and priority, and recommends whether a ticket should be pulled into a sprint. Ideally, the triage team includes representatives with product ownership, QA expertise, and development management knowledge. The frequency of triage depends on factors such as volume of tickets, timeliness, release schedule, and sprint planning. By implementing effective triage, teams can improve productivity, reduce delays, and enhance overall system quality.

Balancing documentation with speed is crucial in today's fast-paced development environment. To achieve this balance, a centralized strategy that incorporates best practices and team collaboration can help streamline the process. Having a reference wiki space to store long-term strategies and testing guidelines saves time and reduces duplicate information. Additionally, breaking down stories into smaller pieces and focusing on specific functionality makes it easier to design tests and create test plans. As teams adopt Test Driven Development, documentation becomes less necessary as automated tests become the driving force behind code development. The need for speed in Continuous Delivery models requires teams to find ways to balance writing tests with delivering products in a shortened timeline.

The challenges of prioritizing and filtering development requests in a Scrum team are significant. A well-functioning Scrum team typically consists of a Product Owner, a Scrum Master, and various team members each with defined roles to play. The Business Analyst plays a crucial role in helping stakeholders develop actionable requests that can be prioritized by the team. This involves analyzing business processes and refining them to create constructive requests for assistance from the Scrum team. The Product Owner must parse incoming information and prioritize it into a consumable request that the team can review during sprint planning, while also providing political insulation and vision to the team. The Scrum Owner is responsible for clearing the path for the team to be productive and successful, focusing on producing well-received output and continuously improving outcomes. By assisting with this process, technology professionals can demonstrate a willingness to participate in broader organizational goals and change perceptions about their profession.

### Training for QA Engineers: A Guide to Free and Cheap Online Classes` To upgrade your team or make a career move into automation, consider using free and cheap online classes. Many valuable resources are available at no cost, including Google and YouTube tutorials, which can provide instant answers and demonstrations. Websites like Lynda.com offer subscription-based programs with video-based courses, while Code School, Tree House, and Udacity also provide affordable options. One-time charge courses on platforms like Udemy can be purchased for a low price, often with an online discussion forum. MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) from schools like UVA, Rice, and MIT offer free classes, such as Coursera's Python course, which requires a commitment and includes online community support. Free websites like YouTube, Code Academy, and Wikipedia can also provide valuable resources for learning various tools and languages.

The author attended DevOps East conference, which combined Agile Development Conference, DevOps East, and Better Software Conference. The event had a strong focus on quality assurance, with conversations dominated by topics such as culture and principles of DevOps, change management tools, and the importance of quality. The author noted that the typical attendee's definition of DevOps is tactical, neglecting the broader concept of DevOps as a movement. The conference held sessions on creating a culture of quality, benefiting from conflict, continuous integration, and team dynamics, with speakers emphasizing the importance of people and planning over tools. The author felt that the event lacked in-depth and mature implementations of DevOps, but had a strong QA focus. They suggest attending the show to hear about modern Agile shops' approaches to improving communication and automation techniques.

In software development and testing, distractions can significantly impact productivity, with the brain taking up to 30 minutes to re-focus after being interrupted. This phenomenon is particularly challenging for scrum teams working on multiple stories simultaneously, leading to "Work in Progress" (WIP) and decreased focus. To overcome this, Agile principles such as prioritizing completed quality stories, considering testing before starting new work, and individual ownership of quality can help a distracted team stay focused. Additionally, eliminating distractions, monitoring progress, and promoting teamwork are essential to maintaining crystal-clear focus on a story. By adopting these strategies, teams can improve productivity and deliver high-quality results.

Sauce Labs recently acquired Screener, a developer tool that helps teams create automated visual tests for their applications. Visual testing is crucial to catch unintended visual bugs when updating UI components and verifies that the UI appears correctly from the user's perspective. It differs from functional testing, which covers all workflows of the system by fully exercising the GUI itself. As development teams shift focus to automated testing, it's essential to include both functional and visual testing in their strategy to ensure a seamless user experience across various devices and screen resolutions. With numerous visual testing frameworks available, such as Applitools, DPXDT, and BackstopJS, teams can choose one that fits their needs to satisfy their missing visual test coverage.

The Road Ahead in Achieving Quality` is a call to action for software teams to establish a roadmap for achieving higher quality through automation and other means. The author emphasizes the importance of setting clear goals, such as automating unit and integration tests, user acceptance tests, REST APIs, visual regression testing, and test coverage. Automation should be prioritized over manual testing, but manual testing still has its place in ensuring product quality. The article highlights the need for engineers to develop a mindset that their code is ready for production before handing it off to QA, and encourages teams to use exploratory testing and bug bashes effectively. Additionally, consideration must be given to non-functional requirements such as accessibility, localization, security, and performance. The author concludes by emphasizing the importance of frontloading quality into acceptance criteria and building until that criterion is met.