In my previous post, I explained that our company’s team in Singapore performs what we call enterprise testing, and I outlined some of the steps we’re taking to help the enterprise testing team to support the agile R&D teams more effectively.
In this post, I’ll share some specific practices that we’re working to implement.
Based on experience we’ve gained from our ‘agile testing pilot’ and from gathered suggestions, here are the specific practices we’re trying to implement for agile teams’ working with our enterprise test group in Singapore.
- The agile team manages the enterprise testing work as stories within the context of their sprints
- During sprint planning, the agile team decides which enterprise testing stories to add in the upcoming sprint
- After sprint planning, members of the agile team meet with the enterprise testing engineers to do sprint planning for the enterprise testing stories:
- Estimate the enterprise testing stories
- Evaluate whether the stories can be accomplished with given resources in the current sprint. If not, then decide to either add different stories to the sprint or to de-scope the stories to a manageable size
- Do basic tasking
- Identify additional info that the enterprise testing engineers need from the agile team
- Enterprise testing engineers add detailed tasks to the agile team’s team board
- Enterprise testing engineers update task progress and status daily
- The agile team and the enterprise testing engineers use communication technology as
necessary to facilitate communication (e.g., video recording important
meetings, using CamTasia, recording Interwise sessions, etc.) - Enterprise testing engineers supplement task status with more detailed status emails to
the team as necessary - In daily standup, the agile team gives virtual status for each enterprise testing story
by reviewing current task status and progress - Enterprise tesitng engineer(s) attend agile team’s stand-up approximately one day each week, schedule
to be determined by team - Enterprise testing engineers communicate issues and questions to the team immediately.
- The agile team has agreed-upon procedures for responding to blocking issues
and questions from the enterprise testing engineers - The team reviews enterprise tesitng story artifacts as they would any other artifacts
(e.g., test plans, testing procedures, scripts, etc.) - The agile team has one or more designated enterprise testing liaisons whose duties are as
follows:- To maintain a detailed understanding of the current status of the
enterprise testing stories, issues and questions - To make sure the team reviews the enterprise testing stories’ status at daily
stand-up - To provide additional information about the enterprise testing stories’ status,
issues and questions in daily stand-up as needed - To follow up on issues and questions raised by enterprise testing engineers and to
provide same-day responses, and to schedule live meetings with enterprise testing
engineers as necessary - Ensure that enterprise testing story artifacts are reviewed as necessary
- To maintain a detailed understanding of the current status of the