Principal consultant and a member of the core team at Agile Artisans (AgileArtisans.com), Jared Richardson is a process coach who works with software teams to help them build excellent software. He sold his first software program in 1991 and has been immersed in software ever since. He helped create the GROWS methodology and has authored a number of books, including the best selling Ship It! A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects and Career 2.0: Take Control of Your Life. He is a frequent speaker at software conferences and a thought leader in the agile space. Jared lives with his wife and children in North Carolina where they, quite by accident, became backyard chicken farmers.
Today’s QA organizations often have sizable investments in test automation. Unfortunately running and maintaining your test suites represents a sizable investment. Far too often this hard work is abandoned and teams revert to a more costly, but familiar, manual approach.
A more practical solution is to integrate your test automation suites with a concept called “continuous integration”. A CI system monitors your source code and compiles the system after every change. Once the build is complete, test suites are automatically run. This approach of ongoing test execution provides your developers rapid feedback and keeps your tests in constant use. It also frees your testers up for more involved exploratory testing.
Jared shows how to set up an open source continuous integration tool and explains the best way for you to introduce this technique to your developers and testers. The concepts are simple when presented properly and provide solid benefits to all areas of an organization.
Agile software practices have never been more popular, but too often teams skip the basics and only pick and choose parts they think are useful. This talk provides a brief background of popular Agile processes and explains how you can apply them to your own work. We’ll discuss both the technical practices and the project management processes. Both are useful alone, but together they’re a powerful force that can revitalize your team and organization.
Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is a popular Agile process for enterprise Agile adoption. It spells out individual roles, teams, activities and artifacts necessary to scale agile from the team to program to the enterprise level. Jared is using SAFe at a large insurance client in the midst of an organizational Agile transformation. We’ll examine the SAFe framework and show you how to get started, as well as what you’ll need to adjust to succeed.
