Today I was at a nice breakfast invite from the Soft Ed guys. They brought out Rex Black for some courses and had him give his short spin on (A)agile testing.
As most of you probably know or can guess, Rex Black’s law is quite the opposite of what I believe testing should be like. So I was quite surprised to see him talk about (A)agile testing. I couln’t see how those worlds really fit together. And I wasn’t disappointed.
[(A)gile as defined in the talk was the commonly misused cloud of anything that is not really Waterfall/V-Model. I will use this definition here and not distinguish between the project management side and the engineering practices as I usually do.]
One of the first things that he said is that he sort of doesn’t believe in (A)agile (or was that (A)agile testing?). Then he went on in his usual self to ponder about Risk Based Testing and how (A)agile is failing it’s targets because testing is being squashed at the end… He even went so far as to propose his own take on sprints (adding a second sprint after each sprint for more testing). He can do that because (A)agile is about freedom but I’m not convinced that’s what he understood why he can do that.
I think Rex misunderstands what (A)aile is all about. In my opinion it’s all about bottom up. Or to use another overused phrase “power to the people“. I asked him about that and he said that that was a dreamers perspective and would never be really implemented. I think that’s what this is really about though. As long as we have managers/sales second guessing their subject matter experts (SMEs) and coming up (dreaming up) with estimates and time-frames overruns and bad projects will continue to happen. Why not let the people in the know do what they do best?
If you are not willing to go down the path of giving power to the people who actually know what they are doing you’re still in Waterfall/V-Model world. Only if you make the mental leap to trust the people you have employed to do their job can you contemplate going (A)agile. (A)agile and all of its different methodologies have (at least) one thing in common. They rely on adhering to the proposed rules of the methodology for them to work. The nice thing is that they are pretty simple and so can be remembered easily. The problem is that they usually get “waterfallified/v-modelized”. My conviction is, that as soon as you do that, you have just migrated all the downfalls of the past to what you want to do in the future.
Rex buys fully into the “waterfallified/v-modelized” agile. That’s like saying you quit before you start. So I classify Rex’s talk as an anti-agile presentation. He would of-course vehemently oppose what I just said and went so far as to indicate that the testing job in an agile world will not change that much and he’ll earn money no matter what happens.
Wat was interesting about Rex’s talk was that there are some new things I hadn’t seen him use before. One that amazed me was the use of Test Oracles. That is something I heard from James Bach for the first time (although I’m not saying one was before the other because I plain just don’t know). Rex was using the exact same definition in his presentation and talk. For those that don’t know James and Rex are probably the most extreme positions we have in testing at the moment (each one on the opposite side). So what’s happening? Will we see a slow amalgamation of all testing lore out there? That would be like a dream come true. Or is this just a another ploy for ISTQB to make it even more encompassing (i.e. we cover that keyword too-type of encompassing)?
Anyway, the talk was good and it definitely opend my eyes a little more but I guess not quite like Rex might have wanted. I learned that the people like Rex are probably the biggest danger to (A)agile and all (A)agile methods. They say yes to agile but do not embrace the pure spirit of the movement (and reading a manifesto doesn’t really do it). Especially in people with a standing such as Rex saying it’s OK to deviate or water(fall) down the (A)agile teachings is really dangerous. They are giving the managers and non-believers out there the ammunition they need to scuttle (A)agile in the workplace.
If (A)agile does not become commonplace in the next 5-10 years it will be a huge loss to the industry. The loss of efficiency has the potential of slowing down or hampering the whole of human development. So I’d be happier if people like Rex who don’t believe that agile can work would say so and not try and fly some quirky path that leaves them somewhere in the middle just to keep in the game. I’m sure he can find enough to do in the “old” world to keep him happy until he retires. We need this revolution in the minds of leaders and managers for IT to survive as a sane engineering practice.
Thank you to SoftEd for the invite and the good breakfast.
Hi Oliver,
I can only agree with you. I am (still) working in a big dilbertian organization, which now tries to use SCRUM as a silver bullet for its own inefficiencies. It is ridiculous. And yes, we do have the special ‘Quality’ sprints
V.