The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Minty-Fresh™.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 2,300 times in 2010. That’s about 6 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 4 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 23 posts. There were 6 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 2mb.

The busiest day of the year was March 22nd with 34 views. The most popular post that day was LeanKit: Kanban Board Experience Report.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were stickyminds.com, google.com, linkedin.com, agile-tester.com, and infoq.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for kanban board, leankit kanban, kanban, retrospective scrum, and scrum board.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

LeanKit: Kanban Board Experience Report March 2010

Retrospective, Scrum Gold Mine or Fool’s Gold? August 2008
1 comment

Team Dynamics, Don’t be afraid of Change October 2008
1 comment

TamperData a free Firefox Plugin to test Server Side Validation October 2010
2 comments

An Introduction to SWAT 2.0 August 2008
2 comments

Their is most likely current plans to make this a paid software as they add new features(Skype and file sharing on its way). So if they keep up this quality and innovation it is definitely a tool to keep an eye on.

A few of my co-workers were asking me how I keep finding bugs in the server side validation, when they can’t reproduce the error at all via the GUI layer. What I told them was about a plugin I use(there are many more similar to this) called TamperData.

TamperData is a free plugin that allows you to monitor,intercept and transform HTML posts after they have been posted by your browser. This will allow you to see how your data is being sent, and override any client side validations that you were imposing.

Many untrained or newer developers put a lot of validation into a UI product via the UI layer such as Javascript, or simple HTML/CSS limitations. What they forget to do is put the same validation in the object to provide safety from such things as XSS Script inject, SQL Injection, Method Overloads, and other types of malicious or just incorrect data that the system was not ready to handle properly.

Below are a few screen shots on the free plugin. You can download it here.

As a new team that has transitioned to Kanban and also deals with distributed team members, we decided to implement a virtual kanban board. After googling around for possible virtual kanban boards we were unable to find any we felt that suited our needs. This lead me to ask around to fellow teams inside of development who also deal with distributed teams and the implementation of Kanban. This led to the recommendation of the LeanKit: Kanban board(link above).

So we started implementing the new Kanban board just over two weeks ago, with pretty good success. The Kanban Board is web based and you can get access to 1 board with 5 users for free. Because we have a team of 7 I created 3 accounts for the Team’s PO, Dev Lead and Team Lead, and then one generic developer account and one generic tester account. We then went and created our Kanban columns for process/development flow with simple drag and dropping and editing. We were even able to create feature swim lanes with there own sub WIP limits to enforce One story at a time for internal development projects(keeping the main focus on deliverables.)

We still use an internal system(JIRA/Greenhopper) so we titled our stories with the JIRA# and a quick description. Inside the comment field we put the team members working on the story, the effort, type and any additional information we may of needed. Then the Process Lead Engineer(this happening to be myself) would manage syncing up JIRA and the Board(or at least observing that this was being followed by the team members moving the story).

So far we have been able to use the board to point out the bottle necks in our development process, mainly for us it was having available builds to test and demonstrate our “delivered” product to our Product Owners.

So far I can say I highly recommend this digital Kanban board for people with distributed teams. We keep it always on display like a real board using the Television pictured above. There is still many new features in development and you can vote for them right at the website on what you want to see next, they have a very agile development cycle as well and deliver frequent updates.

I will report back later in the coming months to let you know how the continued and extensive use of this board fares.

An Introduction to UI web testing using SWAT

Applying modern software development techniques to UI testing

Also you can download SWAT @

http://sourceforge.net/projects/swat/

Please if you have any feedback do not hesitate to email Mike Longin or Myself.

Michael_Longin@ultimatesoftware.com

Christopher_Taylor@ultimatesoftware.com

The main focus on their discussion was really user experience testing. What that means is observing and reporting on the users interaction with the software, or in this case “World of Goo” video game, and how the user responds to the interaction. This is something that I think happens a lot of time after a product has already been shipped. We may beta test it, or get a few “UI specialists” to run through experience testing, but do we ever really pilot play test during the Software Development process?

The answer is usually no. We do not and probably should. The reasons I believe is that we would be able to find more than just “bugs” but "defects” in the users actual experience. The code may work fine but if the user experience is difficult, confusing, frustrating or anything other than positive we can witness these as they occur and apply those adjustments into the code during the development process and not after shipment.

Now unfortunately there is not always a way to have people off the street come and test your user experience during development, mostly for legal/security reasons. However there is probably many people in the company who could fill that role of an untrained user to help test the experience. Having someone go through and run your iterations worth of code when it is near complete(at the story level) to see if they understand or the deliverables are clear can be very valuable feedback tool.

I am very curious thou to successful user experience testing in Agile development shops that focus on web services and how they achieve great usability, any comments?

http://ulti-swat.wikispaces.com/file/view/Agile+2009+-+Applying+modern+software+development+techniques+to+automating+the+web+UI.pptx

I am not going to focus much on the pre-agile pain points as I believe those are very similar to most waterfall environments, and have been heavily talked about it many agile sessions, books and trainings.

First I want to talk about some of the Risks that they experienced and needed to be overcome to improve the Agile transition and practice.

• External Teams outside of the Agile practice
• This can include other parts of the company in which one most rely/interact with that does not follow or believe in the agile implementations that your team my be following. This can cause delays, miscommunication and lack of productivity.
• UI Design teams need to be part of the Agile practice as UI design is critical to the iteration cycle of release.
• Team Inter-dependency.
• In large organizations many people rely on deliverables of other teams to move forward in their iterations. The communication and planning’s between these teams need to be aligned to make sure the goals are the same, or they need to be able to be built modular enough to be able to deliver independent of the other teams progress.
• Lack of Coaches
• Without coaches its hard to introduce teams to successful practices and help people learn the positive aspects of agile.
• Coaches can help communicate and begin dialogue with the non adopters to find where the fear lies in change.
• Fragmentation
• No centralized successful scrum practices. If people are not communicating what makes them successful how can anyone learn to succeed.
• Need to educate non adopters, and if not possible get rid of them. Having the team not believe in the process will always keep them from achieving true success in Agile.
• “Agile done wrong is worse then No Agile”
• Scrummerfall – bad or mix mashed agile practices are usually more damaging than the old ways
• Over reliance on Tools
• The tools used to implement agile are only as strong as the users understanding to use them.
• Don’t rely on a tool to solve your problems, rely on the people.

Now some of the things that we want to do to make Agile “Stick”

• Trust
• Trust within the organization that everyone is backing the change and the practices will allow for people to do what needs to be done without fear of failure.
• Roles
• Education on the roles in agile and how to properly work that role will contribute to the success of the people in them.
• Team “Field Trip”
• Team members need to move around to other team(preferably successful teams) and absorb different patterns and practices that are successful so they can implement them on their own.
• Internal Agile Community
• Sharing ideas is never negative. An internal community dedicated to the improvement of practices and education will give people rich experiences on how to manage Agile on a day to day basis.
• Agile Principles. Education.
• Many people don’t truly understand the principles and need to be educated and talked to about their benefits. This is a role of an Agile Coach. If you understand why we do it, you will be more inclined to do it right.

This was a highly interesting 45 minute session, and I will follow up some more once I read the white paper they submitted.

I will be attending as many sessions as possible in many different areas. If you have any questions feel free to email me at chris@agile-tester.com.

http://agile2009.agilealliance.org/node/91