Agile testing worst practices and best failures (part 1)

Lets start with sample Agile release cycle description that will be used for base for our "worst practices" and "best failures"

Release cycle - 7 weeks

Active Development - first 5 weeks of the release cycle

Feature freeze - 2 weeks(10wd) before release 

• entry criteria
• all smoke automation tests are green
• all features are checked in the master branch
• release branch is created
• only bug fixing is allowed

Code freeze - 1 week(5wd) before release

• entry criteria
• critical, blocking and high priority bugs are fixed
• all new features are tested
• all automated tests are green

 Release - 1 day

• release criteria
• all planned tests are done
• there is no new critical, blocking or other "must fix" bugs
• documentation is ready

to be continued ....

Team leader competence problem

Often the leader and the team expect that leader should be better than team members in all aspects of their work. That is wrong. The team leader should inspire people to perform but should not always be better. Whenever he is capable to help technically he should. But often people in the team are equally good or better than the lead in the particular task/s. Instead of seeing threat for his leadership the leader should use the opportunity to trust and develop the team. So, it is simple - team leaders, give a chance to people to excel when they can and help them when they don't know they can.

How to kill a working automation

You want to kill your automated tests. Here are the best approaches:

• Do not fix bat blocking bugs. This will cause test to become red-ish and unusable after awhile 
• Do worthless UI changes. Do them right before the release.
• After tests is already working do not plan and spend time to support them.  

So it is easy ... Any of the above can easily kill your automation. If you want everything to finish fast just use all them at once.