Introduction Welcome to the last chapter of the Syllables for ISTQB advanced Level Test Manager Certification. The chapter is about people skills and team composition. Being a test manager, it’s not all about knowing technical details and how something should be done. Manager is someone who manages the team, who builds up the team, who motivates the team and who gets the things done. So let’s see how the manager should work and what are the factors to be considered. Test managers should recruit, hire and maintain teams with proper…

Introduction Welcome to the next chapter and it is about improving the testing process. The discussion points for this chapter are as following once established, an organization’s overall test process should undergo continuous improvement. So this chapter covers generic improvement issues first and then introduction to some specific models which can be used for taste process improvement. Taste managers should assume they will be the driving force behind taste process changes and improvements and so should be familiar with the industry accepted techniques we are going to discuss in this…

Introduction And the chapter we are going to discuss is about defect management. And the discussion points would be to gain insight of status of project and present it in correct way. Two critical factors are defect Management process tool used for management of defects. Taste manager must be familiar with what critical data to capture how to properly use process and selected defect management tool. Defect Lifecycle and Software Development Lifecycle So, before getting into how to manage defects, let’s try to understand the defect lifecycle and the software…

Value stream mapping Value Stream mapping is a technique that helps you understand how the business delivers value to their customers. If we look at the definition, it is a complete factbased time series representation of the stream of activities required to deliver a product or service. Okay, it’s quite a fullon definition from the Agile Extension to the Beabod guide. What it means is your Value Stream map is a first step in understanding the business processes in the organization effectively. It is a series of valueadded activities that…

Prioritisation frameworks As you see, using story maps or managing the backlog in general always assumes understanding the relative priority of different elements of your backlog. In this section, we’ll talk about different tools that will help you prioritize your items in the backlog. A prioritization framework is a tool to help decide which items are more important than the others. It can be used in various situations when there are difficult choices to be made, multivariate to choose from, or competing interests. Being a structured tool, it assists in…

Personas Before designing a solution, make sure you know who is it for. Otherwise you risk designing something that no one is interested in. But sometimes it is not that easy because you may have an infinite list of stakeholders. Take for example, a website or a public service. You can never group and name all of the visitors of your website. But these people are your main stakeholders and their needs need to be taken into account when you are designing a solution. This is when the concept of…

Agile ceremonies Delivery evolves around a set of routinely repeated ceremonies. A ceremony is a timeboxed activity with a clear goal that happens in cycles. Again and again, think about it as of a recurring meeting with set agenda and process. Depending on your delivery methodology, a set of ceremonies may be very different. For example, this crumb process will require a different set of meetings compared to say, DSM process. This is the reason the BBA Guide and the Agile Extension, the BBC Guide, do not focus specifically on…

Spikes Sometimes you know that you don’t know something, but you still want to capture it in your backlog. This is when spikes come to rescue. Just like stories. Spikes are an invention of extreme programming XP. Originally there were special types of backlog items that are used to gain the knowledge necessary to reduce the risk of a technical approach or to better understand the requirements or to improve increase the reliability of your story estimate. Due to the nature of exploration needed to complete a spike, we can…

Gherkin notation Syntax used for BDD a second scenarios is called Gerkin but it is also often referred to as given when then scenarios. So why is it called Gerkin? It is because of the framework called Cucumber. Cucumber is a test automation tool and framework that understands these gerkin scenarios and maps these scenarios written in plain English or any other language to a set of automation tests so that when the automation test suit is run, it can report back to acceptance criteria and tell you which of…

Story elaboration and decomposition Story Elaboration is one of the techniques that helps you ensure that your stories have enough details to be delivered. So Story Elaboration is used to define the detailed design and acceptance criteria for a story as needed to deliver a working solution. As such, it is an ongoing activity that happens throughout the delivery horizon and you reduce use wasted effort when you elaborate the stories, if you do it on just in time and just enough basis. So you do not attempt to elaborate…