Video: Agile Testing

Here is another great video. This time, the topic is Agile Testing. I met the speaker, Elisabeth Hendrickson, a few months ago at Agile Open Northwest here in Portland. She led a couple of sessions, and they were some of the best attended and interesting ones of the bunch. This lady has ENERGY and a PASSION (BIG CAPS HERE) about testing. Before meeting her, I didn't know somebody could care so much about testing software. This video is from December 2006, but is still very relevant. If you are transitioning to Agile and have been used to having a separate testing group, this video is for you. If you are still struggling with how testing should be done on an Agile project, you will get something of value. Elisabeth does a great job helping understand the shift that needs to take place to do testing differently within the context of Agile. Here is the video:

Video: Agile Estimating and Planning

I guess this week is the week of video postings, as I have discovered some more great ones to share with you. Today's is from Mike Cohn. I went to a seminar a couple of years ago on the same topic and presenter as this video. There is great content here, especially if your team is struggling with estimating and don't know about story points and planning poker concepts. Mike's presentation style is also engaging and entertaining. This presentation is is two parts, click the videos below to watch each part.

Part One



Part Two

Video: Scrum at Google

Jeff Sutherland provides an excellent video discussing how the Google AdWords team adopted and adapted Scrum to fit their team and the Google environment. As my organization has been going through adoption of Agile, I saw similar "lessons learned" as described in the video. I think there is a lot of valuable knowledge to be gained listening to Jeff. Enjoy!

Interview with the Poppendiecks

InfoQ just recently conducted a video interview with the Poppendiecks. If you don't know who they are, here is an introduction:

Mary and Tom Poppendieck www.poppendieck.com teach and consult worldwide on Lean principles for software. Their practical, customer-focused approach to software development identifies real business value and enables product teams to realize that value. Mary has managed solutions for both operations and new product development. Tom is an enterprise analyst, architect, and agile process mentor.

Lean software gurus Mary and Tom Poppendieck share their years of practical experience, as they speak on the history of Lean thinking, the value of fast delivery and deferred committment, their use of Value Stream Mapping to identify and reduce waste, the importance of identifying and dealing well with cross-organizational and inter-organizational boundaries, and how Lean relates to RUP and Scrum.

They cover a wide variety of topics in this Question and Answer session. Everybody should get something new from it. You can find the video here.

Video introduction to Lean

The following video was presented by Mary Poppendieck on December 2006 at Google. It is called "Competing on the Basis of Speed". She presents many of the Lean concepts as it applies to software. I will dive into how I got into Lean thinking later, but thought this would be a good starting place for those unfamiliar with the concepts.