Transcript: Agile FM radio for the agile community. [00:00:04] Joe Krebs: In today's episode of Agile FM, I have Lisa Crispin with me. She can be reached at very easy to remember lisacrispin. com. Lisa is an author of a total of five books. There's three I want to highlight here or four actually is Obviously, a lot of people have talked in 2009, when the book Agile Testing came out, a practical guide for testers and Agile teams.Then following that more Agile Testing, right? Then I thought it would be most Agile Testing, but it turned into Agile Testing Condensed in 2019 and just very recently a downloadable book, Holistic Testing, a mini book. Welcome to the podcast, Lisa. [00:00:47] Lisa Crispin: Thank you for inviting me. I'm honored to be part of the podcast.You've had so many amazing people on so many episodes. So it's great. [00:00:54] Joe Krebs: Thank you. And now it's one more with you. So thank you for joining. And we will be talking a little bit about a totally different topic than maybe the last 20 episodes I had maybe way back. I did some testing topics, but I cannot recall maybe the last 20 episodes.So we're not about testing a super important topic. I would not consider myself an expert in that. And I don't know of the audience who has been listening to maybe the last 20 episodes are very familiar with agile testing. Maybe everybody has a feeling about, when they hear the word testing, but there is a huge difference between agile testing.And let's say traditional testing methods. If you just want to summarize like very brief, I know a lot of people are familiar with some of those things, but what it is, if somebody says what is agile testing, why was this different to traditional testing methods? [00:01:47] Lisa Crispin: Yeah. I think that there are a couple of big differences.One is that testing this is just a truth and not necessarily something to do with agile, but testing is really just part of software development. So many people think of it as a phase that happens after you write code, but in modern software development we're testing all the time, all the way around that whole DevOps loop, really.And and so the whole team's getting engaged in it through the whole lifecycle and the focus. Is on bug prevention rather than bug detection. Of course, we want to detect the bugs that make it out to production so we can fix them quickly. But really what we want to do is prevent those bugs from happening in the first place.So there are all these great practices that were popularized by that extreme programming and agile, things like test driven development, continuous integration, test automation all the things that go into, the planning. Workshops and things where we talk about our new features and break them into stories and what's going to be valuable to customers, having those early conversations, getting that shared understanding, things like behavior driven development, where we think about what we're going to code before we code it.That's all really different from, I guess I would say a more traditional software development approach where, Oh, we focus on these requirements. The requirements and a lot of people think about testing is just make sure it met the requirements. But there's so much more to that. We've got all these quality attributes, like security and performance and all the things that we also need to test.So it's a huge area, but it's woven into software development, just like coding, just like design, just like architecture, just like monitoring and observability. It's all part of the process. [00:03:31] Joe Krebs: Yeah. It's like a QA baked in, if you want to see it this way. And then also the automation of all that, right?So automating everything you just said is probably also a concern. Not that's necessarily new to agile, but that's a focus as well now I don't know if I don't have necessarily data points around that but I have worked with a lot of Scrum teams and Agile teams in my career.And it seems, if somebody would say what are the challenges within these teams? And one of them is, you can almost always highlight that, and I say almost purposely because there are good exceptions, is to build an increment of work once per sprint. A lot of teams do not accomplish that, and it's often related to testing activities.Why is that, in your opinion, like when we're seeing these teams struggle to put an increment of work out or a piece of the product or whatever you want to call it if you don't use Scrum necessarily, but to build something that could potentially go out. It's the quality standards of going out. What are the struggles out there for teams, especially on the testing side?I see that as you just said, like it's always happening or often happens at the end, rather than in the front. [00:04:46] Lisa Crispin: Yes. Unfortunately, I see, still see a whole lot of scrum teams and other agile teams doing a mini waterfall where they have testers on the cross functional ...
