Espresso Fueled Agile Development : Acceptance Test Engineering Guidance

If you missed the patterns & practices summit....

mpuleio — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 12:37:00 GMT

Ajoy has posted that three of the sessions have been made available online at pnp Summit videos online. Since one of the three sessions is one that Grigori and I did about the Acceptance Testing Guide, Driving Development with Acceptance Testing, I figured I'd share the information. The other two sessions are Ade talking about distributed agile development, and a discussion with Ajoy on the new SharePoint guidance from p&p that I have mentioned before (Guidance on SharePoint, Unit testing SharePoint). If you missed the Summit and want to attend next year in Redmond (or elsewhere), keep an eye on http://www.pnpsummit.com/, which will eventually be updated with information on the next conference.

Back from vacation... and a lot has happened in the last week

mpuleio — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 22:48:30 GMT

I took a week off, which was good. I visited family and spent time relaxing and playing video games. (Fallout3 rocks so far!!). I got back this morning to hundreds of emails to go through. After reading almost all of it, there were a few things that happened recently I wanted to share... Here are the highlights:

Grigori and I have been working (with Gerard and Jon) on the Acceptance Testing Guide...and we released a beta. (Grigori talks about it here: News: Acceptance Test Engineering Guidance BETA1, and the guide is under Releases here: http://codeplex.com/TestingGuidance). We would appreciate feedback.

Unity 1.2 and Enterprise Library 4.1 were both released. Way to go Chris, Grigori, and the rest of the team. (Just Released: Microsoft Enterprise Library 4.1 and Unity 1.2 and And we're live! Entlib 4.1 and Unity 1.2 are released.) Unity had some very neat (and hard to implement) stuff added to it in this release. I know since I paired with Chris on a small part of re-work that allowed the Policy Injection Block functionality to be added. This is a good, solid release of both projects.

p&p opened up the patterns & practices Agile Development Showcase, starting with a paper Ade wrote on Distributed Agile Development at Microsoft patterns & practices. I reviewed the paper and bounced ideas around with Ade. The paper has a LOT of information and helpful hints. (Ade's blog post about it is here: patterns & practices Agile Showcase)

The Redmond patterns & practices Summit is this week (http://www.pnpsummit.com/). I've got to prep for a talk tomorrow after being out for a week (fun). Here are a few other random posts on the topic: patterns & practices Summit in Redmond, Crazy Times Ahead - PDC, P&P Summit, Tech Ed EMEA). The Summit is always fun, and I am looking forward to it.

After the Summit, I'll be ramping down on the Acceptance Testing project now that the Beta is out. I will continue to work on it, just not as my primary focus, as it gets cleaned up, reviewed, re-worked, edited, etc. I'll blog soon about my next challenge.

Acceptance Test Engineering guide Alpha Available

mpuleio — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Last night I posted the Alpha version of Acceptance Test Engineering guide - How to Decide if Software is Ready for You or Your Customer to the Acceptance Test Engineering CodePlex community site. There are 300+ pages of content. It is still a bit rough, has some gaps in it, and needs some work, but there is a lot of good information too.

I would ask for some help from the public (developers, testers, PMs, and folks who act as customers or sponsor software projects): Read the Alpha (or just part of it) and reply to the Feedback Discussion with anything you think we got wrong, anything we got right, or anything we missed entirely. Thanks.

Acceptance Testing Guide Community Preview 2 Available!

mpuleio — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 20:16:38 GMT

As I have mentioned before in a few posts (Acceptance Test Engineering Guidance, Acceptance Testing Guidance Survey, and Acceptance Testing Guide Update), I am working with a team on guidance around acceptance testing. We still have a lot of work to do our the guide, but we have made available a second community preview to show you how things are shaping up and to give you a chance to provide feedback.

Check these out:

The Acceptance Test Engineering Guidance community site on CodePlex (so you can follow the project)
An announcement about the guide (which is being handed out at the Agile 2008 conference this week)
The second community preview of the guide (it is a bit rough, but you should be able to see where we are headed with it)
Provide Feedback on Community Preview Aug 4, 2008 (so we can make changes, add topics we missed, etc).

Acceptance Testing Guide Update

mpuleio — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 03:27:48 GMT

The team has been writing, editing, re-writing, and working hard on putting together a guide on Acceptance Testing. We have made quite a bit of progress, decided on an organization scheme, the basic format of how we want to write each chapter, and have re-worked a lot of content to fit this model. We recently posted two things on the Acceptance Testing Guidance CodePlex site:

A survey on What is Hard To Test?
A preview release of a few chapters/snippets/etc.

So, please answer our survey. It only has ONE question.

Also, send us feedback on the draft sections of the guide we posted by starting up some discussions in the Acceptance Testing Guide Discussions group.

Acceptance Testing Guidance Survey

mpuleio — Sun, 18 May 2008 21:52:00 GMT

We have put together a survey to get a bit more input from the community about Acceptance Testing. If you are at all involved in software development, deployment, or operations acceptance testing proabably impacts you in some way, shape, or form, so you may want to add your insight to what we are working on.

You can find it here: Acceptance Testing Survey

Thanks for the feedback and input.

Acceptance Test Engineering Guidance

mpuleio — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 00:48:23 GMT

As I mentioned before (Acceptance Testing Guidance, Grigori's Take on the Acceptance Testing Project), I am working on guidance around acceptance testing with Grigori.

We now have alive CodePlex site that we can work from: patterns & practices: Acceptance Test Engineering Guidance

We will be posting more as we really get ramped up. We have a LOT of ideas that we will post and talk about. We will also post bi-weekly (or close) drops, probably in the form of Word documents, showing what we have so far, and asking for input.