Building the Right Thing: How Testers Can Help – Lisa Crispin / Emma Armstrong

Has your team ever worked hard to deliver a feature, only to find that no customers want to use it? That’s a frustrating waste of everyone’s time. Just about every software delivery team has limited resources. The product we deliver must provide the maximum value for customers and the business.

Testers can apply their unique skills to help business stakeholders and the software delivery team identify the most valuable features to build next – and gain a shared understanding of exactly what that includes. As testers, we can keep an eye on the big picture, while defining the details of software behavior. Lisa and Emma will discuss how testers can explore quality attributes in all four Agile Testing Quadrants, using examples. They’ll introduce techniques such as example mapping, story mapping, structured conversations, data capture, observations and feature usage information gathering techniques to help decide business priorities and ensure those priorities are met.

About Emma

Emma Armstrong is a test engineer, who has been testing software since 2000. In that time she’s carried out both manual and automated testing and had the opportunity to dig into everything from compilers to web applications. She’s worked with most methodologies, gotten to grips with technologies ranging from chipset hardware to UI (and everything in between), managed test teams and is currently working on financial modeling software.