Re: More on converting a team to XP/TDD ...

On Wednesday, February 5, 2003, at 10:23:07 PM, Sandy wrote:

> QA is typically done when the Dev group throw the code
> "over the wall" for testing. Generally, they have to
> wait till then anyway since the design document is so
> far from reality, only the final code is sufficient to
> write test plans against.

Yes, and that's bad, because it leads to the "QA until we all fall down"
syndrome, since the programmers aren't getting enough feedback about how
they're doing.

> So, what I'm introducing for this next feature we will
> be working on, is to have the QA team extract from the
> requirements document and translate it into user
> stories with the corresponding acceptance tests, in
> cooperation with the developers and "customer" (in
> this case marketing). This shouldn't be a big impact
> on the customer, but rather just a "we want to confirm
> this ... " conversation.

Yes! Have you read Crispin and House, /Testing Extreme Programming/?
They'll give you some other ideas about integrating QA as part of the
Customer Team, which is the water you have your toe in.

> Since the developers are not currently doing TDD, we
> can still push towards a test driven approach without
> actually writing the unit tests. This should start to
> get everyone familiar with the concept of a "deck" of
> acceptance tests to code and manually test against. I
> believe that way, the transition to XP should be
> smoother.

Yes. As a next step, why not automate the tests instead of going manually?
You need to do them repeatedly for regression purposes anyway. You could
start with a few and work up. Might even be worth using some programming
time to help automate QA's tests.

> Hopefully I explained that sufficiently?

> Thoughts?

Really good start. Nice work. Good luck!

Ron Jeffries
www.XProgramming.com
We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
  -- Albert Einstein


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