Agile Testing A Practical Guide For Testers And Agile Teams

Systematic requirements elicitation leads to higher quality products and reduces product risks. In Quality Engineering and Management, product risk mitigation is a key objective. Especially for new products, risk identification is a creative action. In this paper, we present a quality domain-specific design thinking approach to product risk identification and subsequent quality requirements elicitation. The approach systematically guides product teams within four steps in identifying their product-specific quality requirements and associated risks using ideation methods. Implemented in the form of an open self-service kit for teams, it has been designed for scaling in large enterprises. We validate our approach in a large global automotive OEM environment including automotive mobile online services and products, financial services, as well as IT systems development. The key outcome of the work is a design thinking based requirements elicitation method for product quality risks, as well as an implementation in the form of a self-service kit.

Quality Requirements Elicitation by Ideation of Product Quality Risks with Design Thinking

How has design thinking being used and integrated into software development activities? A systematic mapping

Design Thinking (DT) has been chosen as an approach to support problem-solving by many software development companies. However, there are divergences between the professionals of these companies concerning which techniques are performed, which steps are followed, and the way to implement this approach, as it proposes itself, to be divergent to generate numerous alternatives and, also, convergent, to find a solution. For this reason, aiming to characterize how the software companies have been implemented DT, this paper presents the results of a survey answered by 127 professionals from the Brazilian software industry. The results report a variety of scenarios in which DT has been applied: more than ten different models (sets of steps) are followed by the professionals; more than 50 techniques have been used, mainly, for meeting the needs in the process, according to the context of use and based on previous experiences. We also present 29 computational tools that, according to the respondents, assist the execution of DT, in addition to the integration with agile methods, allowing them to generate ideas and solutions, to explore and understand the problem.

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On the Use of Design Thinking: A Survey of the Brazilian Agile Software Development Community.

Agile approaches arose as a way of addressing some of the main challenges in software development. Some of the challenges are changing requirements, lack of understanding about the system's scope, and out-of-sync between code, requirements, and documentation. Software companies' professionals have adopted Design Thinking (DT) to support software development to understand better what customers want, fostering the creation of features and products. Due to the importance of requirement engineering to software development success, this study aimed to characterize what DT benefits and challenges were perceived in requirements engineering by the Brazilian software development community. The current study used mixed methods combining two qualitative methods, a focus group to collect and understand the professionals' DT usage opinions and a survey to confirm the professionals' challenges and benefits. This study identified that DT has helped the professionals improve the requirements gathering and specification, reflecting on better users' real needs understanding and building fittable solutions to support them. The results serve to understand better DT potential, perceived by software industry professionals, to anticipate and support these issues with other professionals.

Towards an understanding of benefits and challenges in the use of design thinking in requirements engineering

While the application of agile principles leads to better project success, some projects still fail due to insufficient understanding of client’s exact requirements. Agile teams have recently started adopting Design Thinking (DT) practices to better understand what is in customers’ mind. We explore suitable DT practices to satisfy customer expectations in agile teams using inductive reasoning. We first formulated a conceptual framework based on a literature review. We then conducted a set of interviews with fifteen domain experts from ten IT service organizations. Interview findings were then analyzed using the Straussian grounded theory. Customer journey, story mapping, prototypes, POC, and customer profiling were determined to be the most suitable methods to identify the needs of customers. Moreover, practicing human-centered approach through workshops, discussions, team communication, and end-user interaction through UAT were also identified to be effective. We further classified the best practices into five categories as customer’s real need identification, transforming customer’s real needs into pilot solutions, visualizing the pilot solution for customer feedback, idea generation for the pilot solution, and brainstorming. Based on these findings, we also derived a framework to achieve customer satisfaction through the adoption of DT in agile-base projects.

Adopting Design Thinking Practices to Satisfy Customer Expectations in Agile Practices: A Case from Sri Lankan Software Development Industry

In the agile framework developers and testers are part of a hyper-productive, self-organizing team. Testing scope changes when user stories are added, updated, or deleted. Moreover, test cases need to be re-written or update when user stories change or removed from the sprint, which wastes time and makes agile testers frustrated. Furthermore, the mini-waterfall model adopted within a sprint could develop unwanted stress in agile testers. Despite these challenges little seem to be understood about the challenges faced by agile testers. We fill this gap by closely studying the challenges faced by agile testers in a multinational IT services organization. We first set up a forum for agile testers to discuss their challenges, malpractices, and best practices. We then conducted an online survey based on the findings from the forum and literature review. Through this, we identified 15 challenges and best practices to overcome those 15 challenges. We further conducted a set of interviews with the subject matter expertise to identify a suitable set of solutions such as conducting retrospective in a fun and engaging way, managing story lifecycle using collaborative tools, setting up ground rules for geographically distributed teams, and introducing innovative sprints.

Challenges Faced by Agile Testers: A Case Study

Robotic process automation (RPA) is the automation of business processes (BPs) using software robots. RPA robots automate repetitive, non-value-adding human work. The extent that a BP can be transformed into a software robot and its utility depends on several factors such as task type, complexity, repeated use, and regulatory compliance. The estimated RPA project failure rates are relatively high, and transforming the wrong BP is attributed as one of the critical reasons for this. Therefore, given a candidate set of BPs, it is imperative to identify only the suitable ones for RPA transformation. In this paper, a decision support tool (DST) is presented to select candidate BPs for RPA. First, 25 factors are identified from the literature that captures the characteristics of a BP. The list is then reduced to 16 factors based on a set of interviews with RPA subject matter experts (SMEs). Then an online survey with snowball sampling was conducted to measure the relevance of those factors in predicting the outcome of RPA transformation of a candidate BP. Finally, the two-class decision forest classification model was used to develop the DST. The utility of the proposed DST was validated by applying it to three RPA projects of a global IT consulting services company.

G.I.U.S Perera

Papers

Adopting Design Thinking Practices to Satisfy Customer Expectations in Agile Practices: A Case from Sri Lankan Software Development Industry

Challenges Faced by Agile Testers: A Case Study

A Decision Support Tool to Select Candidate Business Processes in Robotic Process Automation (RPA): An Empirical Study