Day 4 of 30 days of agile testing: read the agile manifesto and reflect on the implications for your role.
The agile manifesto is brief. I like brief documentation myself. It gives me enough food for thought that I can follow my own avenue but enough key information to fall back to for guidance.
I’ve always followed the first three lines of the manifesto in my previous role reasonably easy. It required me to adapt constantly myself in how I approached my role.
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools and Working software over comprehensive documentation tie together for me.
I can test the product by myself, use all the test case management tools a company is willing to buy and log bugs so we have all the documentation you could never need. I did that in the beginning. I soon noticed that I wasn’t getting to spend much time testing and giving useful feedback to the development team. We iterated, we agreed that scrapping test cases was worth a try. Our documentation became checklists on stories, comments in code and a brief wiki of journals we had used as references for our software (it was pharmaceutical and regulated).
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
I have never had much to do with contract negotiation. That being said, collaborating with customers and delivering a product that they actually want will help with contract negotiation. I’ve been involved in requirements gathering with our customers which helped me to relay to the development team what we should prioritise during development.
Responding to change over following a plan
I’ve only really started following this part of the manifesto in my new role. Previously we had to follow a plan rigidly due to grant funding targets. Now we drop things and move to something a customer has to see right now or they won’t sign up. It’s been fun following a less rigid plan but it also affects my day to day planning. I prepare for a feature to come across, have the devices charged to test it etc only to have to drop that to test something else. For me this is the hardest part of the manifesto to follow. I can adapt to it, of course, I just find it difficult right now to get to grips with it.
How do you think the agile manifesto impacts your role? Do you find yourself picking parts out of it that you can apply to your job or do you stick rigidly to it?