Showing posts with label Agile. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Agile. Show all posts

SCRUM Process and role of a Tester

What is Scrum?
In software development world Scrum is one of the agile approach featuring an iterative process for managing a software development projects. Scrum is an iterative, team-based process especially suitable process to adopt for a rapidly changing requirement, or not clear requirement.
Agile-Scrum has a structured way of development cycle and specific role of team member. A product development time is divided into a cycle called Sprint. A sprint is a period of time usually 2-4 weeks in length.

Daily stand up meeting: It allows team member to request more work, ask for help, and report completion of work. Basically three things are important - what you did yesterday, what you are going to do today and any question, for team. Or saying scrum terminologies, Tasks accomplished yesterday, task for today, and issues, ideas, helps, anything he may need or can offer to team.

 What is Product Backlog Item (PBI)?
Product backlog is simply functional or technical requirement of a system or application created by product owner. In scrum process it is a unit of work that can be divided into multiple tasks called Sprint Backlog Item (SBI). Product Backlog Items may or may not contains detail information (usually not). Team member can add more detail in SBI. And product owner can add more detail later on too because PBI is a dynamic entity (usually add detail information for a early estimated effort). Usually, Sprint starts PBI includes very high level and as sprint progress, product owner add detail in existing one and new one targeting for coming sprint.
During Sprint planning, a meeting "Product Backlog Walkthrough" the SME and Product Owner will their vision of the system using the Product Backlog Items. The Product Owner presents the highest priority PBI to team. They collaborate about how much can be turned into an increment of potentially shippable product functionality during the next Sprint.

 Sprint Backlog Item (SBI):
SBI simply is a task to be complete in a sprint. SBI is associated to a PBI, and relation is like parent and child. One PBI have one or more SBIs. SBIs remains unchanged during a sprint. So SBI is a tasks having 4-16 hrs (some company says not more than 8 hrs) estimated. Once, task is done its owner put estimated hour o and status to done.

 User Stories:
User story is describes high level business flow, functionalities. It is a written description of story
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Team Foundation Server - Simple Introduction for a tester

It is a tool from Microsoft for overall project collaboration. It has almost everything for a software development project such as source control, reporting, bug and requirement tracking, and team build.
Before further talking about TFS let spend some time understanding following:
What Is Visual Studio Team System?
VSTS: MS- Visual Studio Team System is a powerful tool that integrates the entire team across the entire life cycle. It has solution to successfully, plan, build, deploy and test a project. According to Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System is a productive, integrated, and extensible suite of life cycle tools that expands the Visual Studio product line to enable greater communication and collaboration among software development teams.
VSTS is divided in Integration, Architecture, Development and Testing according to different team's requirements. In general, It is designed in such a way that all stakeholders can directly communicate with each other, can view each others tasks and updates. So simply saying, it is a tool by Microsoft that provides guidance and communicates which item need to be worked on. And can customize it which ever methodology you follow. VSTS has two software development best practice methodologies.

 1.1 One is MS Solution Framework for agile software development, it is recommended and default methodology form team system. It is best for team for more rapid, ready for change environment with communication with customer and project having small team. Agile is targeted to smaller team members on team. Team system is also highly follow the philosophy, model introduced by agile alliance:
-  individual interaction is more important than process and tool. 
-  Customer collaboration is highly fruitful for project than customer contracts.
- Responding to change according to situation makes positive impact on project rather than following plans.
1.2 Another is MSF for CMMI: CMMI is about process improvement which appeals to larger projects, typically project with long- range planning and communication are more important rather than frequent release and feedback form customer. CMMI is a model for continuous process development. It is targeted to reduced SDLC cycle times, improved ability to meet cost and schedule target and improve quality. It is a very formal methodology for SW development and used for environment where team needs close communications and integrated work environment. Project management – create and manage team project Work item tracking: Create and track bug, Tasks, Change management – version control management to project. Build server – build management Continuous Integration Build (CIB) Project site – SharePoint Reporting – different reporting chart can be customized.
From a Tester's point of view, if someone is going to join a team which is using VSTS/TFS, understanding team project's structure will make his job easy.
A team project has 5 main elements. Work Items, Documents, Reports, Team Build, and Source control.

A Work Item is means the work to be completed on the project. It can be a bug, a task for adding new feature, writing a business document etc. And can be created by anybody involved in.
Using document feature, once cad add project related document under document node.
Reports node is for project status tracking, for example a bug report, daily status report.
Team build node contains team builds, one can add new team build. Source Control node , by this one can access source codes.
So, in conclusion TFS glues the whole project team and facilitates to collaborate between the various team members/roles. VSTS Test edition is for testing purpose(automation). But all are integrated in visual studio environment.
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