A Lucky Shot at Agile?

Zeger Van Hese

Z-Sharp

This is not another agile fairytale. I happened to be a tester in a scrum team that started its first sprint almost two years ago. We were all agile novices, and – in retrospect – we hit it off pretty well: we worked iteratively, delivering value at regular intervals. But after a while reality dawned upon us. For every agile practice we embraced, there seemed to be another practice that was carelessly neglected or even abandoned weeks before our final release.

In the presentation I will describe life as a tester in a team of agile rookies: the context – a major healthcare IT company – and what agile did and didn’t do for us. I will talk about the practices we adopted successfully, but also highlight mistakes and missed opportunities. Was our shot at agile just a lucky shot or one that proved the value of agile methods?

About Me!

Zeger Van Hese has a background in Commercial Engineering and Cultural Science. He started his professional career in the motion picture industry but switched to IT in 1999. A year later he got bitten by the software testing bug (pun intended) and has never been cured since.

He has a passion for exploratory testing, testing in agile projects and, above all, continuous learning from different perspectives. Zeger considers himself a lifelong student of the software testing craft. He was program chair of Eurostar 2012 and co-founder of the Dutch Exploratory Workshop on Testing (DEWT). He muses about testing on his TestSideStory blog and is a regular speaker at national and international conferences. In 2013, Zeger founded his own company, Z-sharp.


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