Agile Testing Coaching Cards released

The Agile Testing Coaching Cards can be used by agile teams to investigate their testing mindset and the practices that are used for testing software. With these cards, they can explore their way of testing and define actions to improve it.

These cards have been developed in collaboration with  Violaine Truck, who also translated them to French: Cartes de Coaching pour Test Agile.

An earlier version of the cards has been reviewed by many people from agile testing communities all around the world. We thank Alan Jechort, Anko Beijleveld, Armin Ruhland-König, Bart Vanherck, Bart Wijnen, Craig Smith, Emna Ayadi, Haider AL HASHIM, Huib Schoots, Jean-Pierre Lambert, Mario Moreira, Michiel de Wit, Nicolas Fedou, Regis Lemaire, and Srinath Ramakrishnan for giving us valuable feedback on draft versions of the cards which helped us to improve the cards.

Technical Coaching

The Agile Testing Coaching Cards is a deck of 99 cards (PDF format) with statements about agile testing mindset, values, principles, and practices. A suggestion for using these cards in coaching is included, but agile teams, coaches, Scrum masters, and test consultants, can also use their own coaching techniques with these cards.

These cards can be used for technical coaching about agile testing. The principles and practices mentioned on the cards can help to foster valuable discussions in teams and help them decide to try out testing techniques or change their way of working.

Some examples of the coaching statements are:

  • We make sure we have clear, precise and testable acceptance criteria in each user story because those can be used to build executable specification examples
  • We give equal importance to testing, checking and exploratory techniques
  • We have experience with test-first approaches such as Test-Driven Development (TDD)
  • Chaos engineering is used to improve the availability and reliability of systems
  • In order to automate tests, developers collaborate with testers

As the above statements show, these cards aim to improve the testing practices of agile teams and organizations. They are not just for testers; they can be used to intensify collaboration in and between agile teams when it comes to testing throughout the development chain.

These cards can also be used in agile retrospectives to help teams to reflect. And they can be used together with the Agile Self-assessment Game to explore the effectiveness of your agile testing practices and decide on what to improve. Finally, combining them with the Agile Quality Coaching Cards can put your testing practices into a broader quality perspective.

 

 

 

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