Bold Boast Book Club #1: Agile Testing

One of the techniques that resonated with me from “The Secrets of a Buccaneer Scholar” was that of making “Bold Boasts.”

“A bold boast is a trick I use to get myself going on a project. It’s basically a promise to accomplish some feat, such as to write an article or teach a class. I make the boast that I can teach something, and then my mind gets serious about solving the problems that need to be solved.

-James Bach

Along those lines, I decided to use this blog to help me focus my efforts around achieving goals.

I am currently working remotely from Seattle as an “Army of one” tester implementing testing process to a small non-profit in San Francisco. I am super keen on the agile methodology so this opportunity to build a testing infrastructure from the ground up is extremely appealing.

I’m approaching the end of my 90 day contract period and hoping to become a full time employee with this organization this month. I have spent much of the past 70 days becoming acquainted with the product and the team. I’ve tested new stories using ET and SBTM, built up a simple process for handling escalations, and researched test automation.

These last 70 days have given me an opportunity to identify a lot of strengths in the team and uncover some weaknesses in the implementation of agile methods. Being new to this process, product and team, I have been building a backlog of concerns from our early iterations. On my 2nd day on the job my boss was kind enough to allow me to take the day off so that I could attend an all day ATDD seminar being taught by Elizabeth Hendrickson . In fact he was excited about the prospect because he would like me to eventually teach and implement ATDD.

The course was awesome, I’ll blog about it in another entry, but it introduced me to a lot of smart concepts and taught me a lot about what was missing in past failed agile teams with which I’ve worked.

I realized as my backlog of concerns was growing and I continued to glean everything I could from the internet and the amazing community of testers that have been gracious enough to offer their thoughts and help on twitter and Skype, that I needed more data. I needed to learn some new skills to tackle this project and start getting some answers to these questions.

Elizabeth Hendrickson mentioned “Agile Testing” by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory, during the ATDD class and since then I had been corresponding with Lisa Crispin over twitter. I have found Lisa to be an awesome person who has been very generous with her thoughts and time. I realized that what I needed was to have Lisa go over all of my backlog of questions and sit next to me while I come up with a plan to mitigate the learning curve. I would never ask Lisa to take time away from her busy life to actually do that, but I realized that her thoughts were available in “Agile Testing”.

I ordered “Agile Testing”. and it arrived 4 days ago. 3 days ago, I tore into it, rabid for the information contained within. I was a bit intimidated by the ~500 pages of what, at first, seemed like quite small text. I have not read a technical book cover to cover since summer of 1998 when I decided that I would change my life and break into high tech by moving to Portland, read a huge book on Windows 98 cover to cover and apply for an entry level tech support position.

I did not want Lisa’s book to end up collecting dust on my bookshelf, so I decided to measure my velocity. I sat down on the couch before work the morning after unwrapping the book and set a timer on my phone for 30 minutes. At the end of the 30 minutes I had read roughly 16 pages. I realized after another 30 minutes that my brain starts to wander and my comprehension wanes. So I had established that I could read for an hour while remaining focused on the material, and in that hour I could digest 32 pages of content. Having done some simple math, I have devised a plan to finish reading this book in 15.34 days.

This is my “Bold Boast”. I am going to regularly blog my progress as I approach my January 14th deadline. At present I am at page 107, right on track for day 3. The first 107 pages of this book have been fantastic. I started attempting to take notes today, with limited success, but the ideas are definitely taking root. As with The Secrets of a Buccaneer Scholar, the main challenge with this book for me has been not getting distracted when my mind wants to run off and try this stuff. I have 2 weeks left on my current 3 week iteration, which will definitely be very busy. I want to devote time to drafting a plan using the precepts learned from this book so that by the next iteration I can get started pitching a plan to experiment with some process adjustments.

Since I am evidently incapable of getting to the point in less than a thousand words, I’ll leave it at that. My “Bold Boast” is that I will finish this book by the 14th of January. I will update this blog regularly over the next couple of weeks with my take on the content and how I hope to apply these lessons to my work.

I will endeavor to be more brief in those posts.