As promised, here’s the deck Mary Poppendieck and I used during the workshop. We hope it was worth the attendees’ time. We encourage you to try new techniques we talked about and let us know how your agile adoption is going. For more information, visit Mary’s site.

I am pleased to announce the release of the Acceptance Test Engineering guide BETA1. You can download it from http://codeplex.com/TestingGuidance

Common Scenarios Addressed:

• How to Plan for Acceptance Testing
• What Kinds of Acceptance Tests to Run
• How to Create and Run Acceptance Tests
• Defining What “Done” Means
• How to Justify Your Approach

Contents at a Glance:

PART I – THINKING MODELS: an overview of acceptance testing and explains several models that are useful in conceptual thinking about acceptance testing. It also includes items that are necessary for planning acceptance testing. This part is intended to be read from beginning to end.

PART II – THUMBNAILS: a thumbnail is a short overview of a practice that explains what it is, when you may want to use it, the risks that it mitigates, and an overview of how to perform the practice. Thumbnails also include a list of references to papers, books, and other resources that provide more complete descriptions of the practice in question. The main purpose of a thumbnail is to describe a topic well enough to provide an overview, serve as a mental reminder for someone who has used the practice on how to do it, and give someone unfamiliar with the practice enough information about the practice and its applicability to determine if they want to learn more about it. This part is intended to be used as a reference; most readers will not read it from beginning to end.

PART III – SAMPLES: a collection of sample artifacts generated by applying different practices in a fictional real-world situation for Global Bank. These artifacts are embedded in a series of case studies of what the Global Bank team may have produced while building the application. The case studies provide some context to the individual artifacts. They also provide cross-references to the practices described in Part II. The artifacts are intended to be used as way to learn more about how to perform a practice; they can also be used as templates for your own artifacts.

Webcast

Gerard, Jon and I did a webcast talking about the concepts and the way we are writing this guidance.

Feedback

Your  feedback is invited. Please post it under Discussions on Codeplex. Also, if you have an interesting experience with acceptance testing that you’d like to share and perhaps be profiled in our guide as a case study, we’d like to hear about it.

Mary Poppendieck and I are set to run a pre-conference workshop on Agile Perspectives: Industry and Microsoft.

In it, we will provide our observations on what works, what doesn’t in the world of agile, and why (we call this segment of the workshop “Reality of agile”). The objective is to provide pragmatic advice, recommendations and actions that you could use tomorrow to improve the way your teams produce software.

Mary, the author of popular Lean Software Development and Implementing Lean books, will provide her lean perspective from many years in the industry (if you want to find out more about Mary, check out this really good interview that Scott Hanselman took with both Mary and Tom Poppendieck, in which they challenge the notion of success in software industry). In turn, I am going to share my experience from several projects at Microsoft patterns & practices. Several other colleagues from Microsoft will join our panel at the end of the day to debate hot issues of agility. The floor will be open to audience participation. Mary and I identified several hot issues to bring up. However, it would be really good to know what kind of stuff you’d prefer us to touch upon. Please post your At-Issue suggestions in response to this post or simply email me. Thanks and see you in LA!

On July 31 we have kicked off the EntLib4.1 and Unity 1.2 project. This is a minor service release. In it, we address several bugs and enhancements, and provide the following features:

-         Collections support in the Unity Application Block (Unity dependency injection container)

-         Improved support for generics in Unity

-         Interception mechanism in Unity (including integration with the Policy Injection Application Block)

-         Improved type picker of the config tool (this one needed a face lift for a long time)

-         Debugging visualizer (to allow for easy navigation of mappings, corresponding lifetime policies as well as container extensions).

We also plan on doing rigorous testing on 64-bit machines. I’ll post a complete backlog on Codeplex soon.

We intend to release regular community previews at the end of each iteration (biweekly).

I am excited to continue working with several people from the previous release (Chris, Fernando, Vijaya) and also welcome new team members: Erik and Dennis. Alex, Hanz, and Carlos take on the roles of consultants. This is an amazing team! At the end of the first day we already had two user stories done-done.

Codeplex discussions remain the primary venue for posting your feedback. Keep it coming.

In our quest to produce actionable acceptance testing guidance, we are looking for hard-to-test scenarios from real world projects so that we could test our guide against them. We would appreciate if you shared your testing problems with us.

For example, you may find testing the logics that generates binary data (like image generation, voice synthesis) hard.

Also, feel free to tell us how you solved them if you did.

Link to survey.

• Tech-Ed 2008 Developers, June 2-6, Orlando, FL. I’ll be giving a talk on the Enterprise Library (DVP02-TLC). I’ll be also hanging out in the exhibition areas (mainly, Process & Project Management (DVP- VSTS 2008)).
• CAST 2008 , July 14-17, Toronto, ON. I look forward to good interaction with testing experts and thought leaders from around the world.
• Microsoft Product Fair, July 22-23, Redmond, WA.
• TechReady7, July 28-Aug 1, Seattle, WA. I’ll do a couple of talks on the Enterprise Library and agility.
• Agile 2008, Aug 4-8, Toronto, ON – the major world conference on agile software engineering. Mary Poppendieck and I are program-charing the conference.
• STARWest 2008, Sep 29- Oct 3, Anaheim, CA. Jon Bach and I will give a talk on Acceptable Acceptance Testing, telling the tale of our team producing the guide on acceptance testing and dogfooding our own recommendations.
• PNSQC2008, Oct 13-15, Portland, OR. We have a paper "Acceptance Testing: a love story in two acts". No Shakesperian-level drama, but some exciting stuff for sure.
• PDC 2008, Oct 26-30, Los Angeles, CA. Together with Mary Poppendieck and other colleagues from p&p, we’ll be presenting the Agile Perspectives pre-conference event.

If you are planning on attending any of these conferences, please come by and say hello. I would love to hear your stories of using or reasons for not using the Enterprise Library, Unity, other p&p assets. I would also be glad to chat with you about our upcoming guidance on Acceptance Test Engineering and hear your experiences, lessons learnt, and suggestions.

Also, I talk to user groups regularly. If you are from the city I am visiting (or nearby) and would like me to give a talk to your user group (agile, .NET, software testing), feel free to ping me.

As I mentioned in the announcement of the Enterprise Library 4, two pieces were removed from the release: Application Block Software Factory and Strong-Naming Guidance Package. These are made available as a separate download on EntLibContrib. Here’s the direct link. Both require GAX.