Can We Stop Talking About "Agile" Yet?

Posted by Eric Jacobson at Friday, October 30, 2009

"Agile"? Ohhhh, what is this "agile" stuff you speak of?

Look at the topics of most testing/dev conferences, webinars, blogs or tweets. Can you find the word “Agile” in there? I’ll bet you can. I was excited about it five years ago and I thought it would have a huge impact on my software testing challenges. It has not.

Testers still have to look at a chunk of software and figure out how to test it. This is still the most challenging activity we face everyday. When we find a problem, it doesn’t matter if you want us to log a bug, not close a story, stick it on the wall with a Post-It Note, or whisper it in a developer’s ear. The same testing must occur to find the problem. Everything else is what you do before or after the test.

The grass always looks greener on the other side of the fence. But once you hop the fence you’ll realize it is just as brown.

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7 comments:

  1. Jonathan Kohl said... October 30, 2009 at 3:33 PM

    Amen. :-)

  2. PeterL said... October 30, 2009 at 4:54 PM

    Hurrah! Well Said!

  3. Cruisinqa said... October 30, 2009 at 10:02 PM

    I can understand how you can feel that way but I don't agree. When I was working in an ultra-strict waterfall environment I felt the same way. All of the magazine articles, blogs, and consultants were talking about Agile practices and I was sick of it. Now, however, I work for a company that has embraced Agile and SCRUM from the top down (CEO to developers) and I can see first-hand the benefits of Agile and iterative development processes - and how quickly we can deliver high-quality software to our customers. I believe it is a matter of context, for me the grass is certainly greener.

  4. TLACrayola said... October 30, 2009 at 10:33 PM

    Well "agile" is antiquated now. The new thing you'll start hearing soon is "lean software development". A lot of the blogs I'm reading now I guess got tired of using "agile" and is moving over to this new "lean" software "paradigm shift".

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_software_development

  5. Tony Bruce said... October 31, 2009 at 2:13 PM

    Similar thoughts:
    http://www.linkedin.com/answers/technology/software-development/TCH_SFT/548985-11505631

    http://www.sqablogs.com/tonybruce/2446/Are+testers+still+being+hired+on+their+testing+ability%3F.html

  6. Jim said... November 2, 2009 at 2:35 PM

    There's also Kanban, which comes from Lean Manufacturing. I haven't worked in a Kanban environment but am pretty intrigued by the way it might protect QA from getting dumped on at the last minute. I'm a certified scrum master and love scrum, however this article blew my mind with some kanban alternatives: http://blog.crisp.se/henrikkniberg/2009/04/03/1238795520000.html. I'm curious if others have opinions on this.

  7. Unknown said... November 11, 2009 at 8:44 AM

    Hi Eric,

    My name is Gil Zilberfeld, and with my colleague, Roy Osherove, we do a video cast called: This week in testing.

    Roy talks a bit about this post in this episode, so please come and watch. And if you like, talk about us so more people can enjoy.

    Thanks,

    Gil Zilberfeld
    Typemock

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