A Little View Into "Agile Up 4 Here"

Today and tomorrow i will be getting the chance to do something really cool. I get to join an Agile team for a brief part of a code retreat and an active master's session on working with agile teams, Agile testing, and rapid software development.

Elisabeth Hendrickson of Quality Tree Software and Agilistry Studios has a group of people come together each year and participate in a code retreat called "Agile Up X Here" (as you might guess, the first one was called "Agile Up 2 Here" and this is the third iteration of this retreat. We have a number of cool people participating in this event, ranging from product owners, UX designers, programmers, and yes, in my case, dedicated testers.

One team, two tables and just a few days.

Our focus is to create from scratch a simple web game using HTML 5 and JavaScript. We've had a focus of starting from nothing and creating stories, defining acceptance criteria, doing test driven development, pulling stories from the board and working on them, and yes, testing! Today has been interesting in that I've spend the better part of the day directly pairing with one of the developers in a "driver/navigator" capacity. While he wrote code, I had the chance to consider areas we should test, as well as performing exploratory tests on other modules as they are delivered. We also expressed a profound propensity for spontaneous silliness, which made the entire experience a great deal of fun.

Me and Alex Bepple automating the deployment of the app.

For those who want to get in on the fun with us tomorrow, we will be holding a weekday edition of weekend Testing. It will be held tomorrow (Thursday, May 24, 2012) at 2:00 PM Pacific. For this session, we have a simple mission and charter to share: "Be prepared to share your approach to testing what may appear to be a very simple application. Simple does not mean little needs to be done. Single testers, pairs and teams can present their charters, what areas they decided to test, and what they saw along the way. If you are interested in participating, please contact "weekendtestersamericas" on Skype and tell me you would like to join us tomorrow.

My thanks to  Matt Barcomb, Kevin Baribeau, Alex Bepple, Jaime Camphorst, Elisabeth Hendrickson, Dave Liebreich, Rickard Lindberg, and Zee Spencer for participating in this great event. I'm hoping the Weekend Testing session will prove fruitful and successful, and  I look forward to having more opportunities to participate in events like this.