May meeting announcement – Panel Discussion ATDD Implementation in Enterprise

11:30-11:45 Lunch and Networking 

11:45-12:45 Panel Discussion

Note: This is a joint meeting with agileLunchbox.

Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) is an important milestone in Agile journey. ATDD is a long and continuous journey especially in a large department and companies with matrix management. Implementation of ATDD includes many challenges. Meeting these challenges is guaranteed to yield quality products and better communication within and across team. Join us for our May meeting to hear from our panelist who have pioneered and championed ATDD implementation in larger departments and in multiple teams.

Our Panelists

Sue Fielding Is the Software Quality Assurance Leader for Nationwide Financial’s Integrated Application Services Team.  Sue has been leading technology teams for over two decades.  She has experience implementing and supporting a broad spectrum new technology & processes.  Most recently, Sue has worked with her team to establish an ATDD maturity model that gauges ATDD team readiness & progress.  She has also been focused on ATDD skillsets and the transitional needs to move from manual tester to test automator or from developer to test automator.  She is a 1988 graduate of The Ohio State University with a major in Management Information Systems.  She is a MBA honors graduate of Capital University (1995).

Aruna Srikanth is currently the Director of Software Quality Assurance for the Finance IT Business Solutions area at Nationwide Insurance.  In this role she is responsible for Requirements Elicitation, Quality Assurance, Quality Control and Release Management functions.  She has over 22 years of prior experience within Software Quality Assurance activities at Intergraph Corporation, AT&T, IBM and at Nationwide Insurance.  Aruna is a certified Lean Six Sigma Black Belt and has led several continuous improvement initiatives at Nationwide.

Aruna’s involvement utilizing Agile began in 2006 where she was an active leader for the adoption of Agile practices within Nationwide Financial Internet Applications area.  Automated Acceptance Test Driven Development was of particular interest as it put the Quality Assurance and Quality Control practices ahead of code development utilizing a Test First Methodology.

Steve Coleman has spent the last ten years working for Nationwide in various IT roles such as Developer, Manual/Automation Test Analyst, Coach, and Manager. In regards to ATDD, Steve was the lead on an ATDD A3, which used the scientific method to determine if ATDD could be used effectively within Nationwide’s Application Development Center (ADC). As a result of the A3, Steve spent a year and a half coaching all ADC development lines in the basics around ATDD implementation as well as the general Agile practices that enable ATDD. Currently, Steve is an Software Quality Assurance Manager within the ADC.

Thanks to Improving Enterprises for hosting us and providing lunch!

If you are planning to attend, please RSVP at – http://www.meetup.com/techlifecolumbus/events/177257002/

Meeting Details –

April meeting announcement – Extreme ATDD

Whether ATDD seems like an extreme approach to you or business as usual, join Terry and Ayan as they explore ways to extend the concept and apply the techniques. We will identify various stakeholder groups (not just users) and how the team and Product Owners can use ATDD to guide conversations and enable a shared understanding about the SUD (System Under Development) and articulate what success means to them.

Please join us in our April meeting with Terry Wiegmann and Ayan Dave on Extreme ATDD.

Thanks to Quick Solutions for hosting us and sponsoring food!

If you are planning to attend, please RSVP at – http://www.meetup.com/techlifecolumbus/events/158437012/

Meeting Details –

Slides from February meeting (The Scourge of Testing: Test Data Management)

Here is the slide deck from our February meeting.

February meeting original post.

March meeting announcement – Social Hour

Join us in March for social time at Improving with fellow ATDD enthusiasts! We won’t have a formal agenda, rather take the time to get to know other practitioners and share your experiences. Pizzas, drinks and fun will be provided. We hope to see you there.

Thanks to Improving Enterprises for hosting us and providing lunch!

If you are planning to attend, please RSVP at – http://www.meetup.com/techlifecolumbus/events/163449632/

Meeting Details –

February meeting announcement – The Scourge of Testing: Test Data Management

Test data management is often a forgotten need. That is until the consequences are of mismanaging or failure to manage come home to roost. In today’s world, IT organizations produce and rely on huge volumes of data. As systems become more complex, so do the test cases needed to validate them as well as the test data needed to execute the test cases. We will discuss the test data management life cycle and real world examples of test data management gone awry in order to better understand the importance of good test data management practices. It is important to note, that this session is NOT about test case management or about data element profiling or identification techniques. It is about data in terms of data sets and what is needed to support a testing effort.

Joseph is responsible for the development and delivery of Cohesion’s Quality Assurance and Testing Services. As Director of Quality Assurance and Testing Service, Joseph draws on more than 15 years’ experience providing executive-level leadership while managing high profile initiatives with a demonstrated ability to drive people towards successful delivery. Throughout his diverse career, Joseph has built a solid reputation as a thought leader who demonstrates a results-driven business approach and exceptional ability to create innovative solutions to today’s challenges. Joseph is a strong leader in business processes with a proven history of providing project and portfolio management of large technology initiatives. He brings both a strategic and tactical thought process to solving IT related issues.

Joseph earned a Bachelor’s in Electronic Engineering Technology from World College, a Bachelor’s in Technical Management from DeVry University, and his MBA from Keller Business School of Management with a concentration in Information Systems. Joseph is also PMP certified.

Thanks to your sponsor Northwoods for sponsoring lunch and place.

If you are planning to attend, please RSVP at – http://www.meetup.com/techlifecolumbus/events/159381592/

Meeting Details –

January meeting announcement – Open Discussion on Managing Test Failures

This month, we will facilitate an open group discussion on how to manage test failures.  All too often we create automated tests that initially pass, but slowly over time, tests start to fail – some due to bugs, some due to test or environmental failures.  Different groups have different strategies for managing these test failures.  As a group, we want to share how folks have effectively managed these situations.  Hopefully, we’ll all learn a new way of managing failures so that they do not obliterate test automation efforts.

Thanks to ComResource for hosting us and providing lunch!

If you are planning to attend, please RSVP at – http://www.meetup.com/techlifecolumbus/events/154899512/

Meeting Details –

December meeting announcement – Social Hour

Join us in December for social time and celebrate Holidays at Improving with fellow ATDD enthusiasts! We won’t have a formal agenda, rather take the time to get to know other practitioners and share your experiences. Pizzas, drinks and fun will be provided. We hope to see you there.

Thanks to Improving Enterprises for hosting us and providing lunch!

If you are planning to attend, please RSVP at – http://www.meetup.com/techlifecolumbus/events/138566282/

Meeting Details –

November meeting announcement – Open Discussion on strategies for writing automated tests for testing integration of multiple systems

Come see Central Ohio ATDD wizards in November for an Open Discussion on strategies for writing automated tests for testing integration of multiple systems.

Writing acceptance tests for your system is one thing, but what happens when you want to write automated tests for interactions between multiple systems?  What if that other system you want to interact with isn’t a system that you own?  We’ll have an open discussion about the techniques and challenges that you’ll face when you try to write automated tests across system boundaries.

Thanks to Nationwide for sponsoring for hosting us and providing lunch!

If you are planning to attend, please RSVP at – http://www.meetup.com/techlifecolumbus/events/138566212/

Meeting Details –

October meeting announcement – Structured Conversations and 7 Dimensions

Join us in October for an interactive workshop where Terry Wiegmannand Ayan Dave will share a high level overview of Structured Conversations and 7 Dimension for forming Acceptance Tests. Structured Conversations is an approach to Exploring, Evaluating and Confirming product needs with stakeholders developed by Ellen Gottesdiener and Mary Gorman.

The 7 Dimensions, also by Ellen and Mary, is a framework for developing and categorizing a comprehensive understanding of the product resulting from the Structured Conversations.

Terry and Ayan will share how they used the 7 Dimensions when working with stakeholders to collect domain knowledge and categorize questions that enabled them to build a list of Story Questions specific to the project’s domain that easily translated to Acceptance Tests.

This will be a working session enabling you to build a similar Acceptance Test asset for your project, whether COTS or custom, new or maintenance, heavily regulated, development or changing platforms.

Terry Wiegmann, CSQE, CBAP, PSPO, ACG

Terry is a longtime software quality engineering practitioner in commercial and backoffice software in both plan-driven and agile approaches. She is one of the few people in the world to be both an IIBA Certified Business Analysis Professional and an ASQ Certified Software Quality Engineer, and is also a Professional Scrum Product Owner, Advanced Gold Toastmaster and Ambassador for the Lewis & Clark Trail Heritage Foundation.She presents and teaches frequently throughout the Midwest on quality, analysis and agile topics; as Director and the People Service Line Lead with Quick Solutions, she is passionate about helping analysts and teams celebrate learning and working with agility, efficiency and joy.

Ayan Dave, PMP, PSM, OCMJEA

Ayan Dave is a software engineer with eight years of experience in building and delivering high quality applications using languages and components in JVM ecosystem. He is passionate about software development and enjoys exploring open source projects. He is enthusiastic about Agile & Extreme Programming and frequently advocates for them. Over the years he has provided consulting service to several organizations and has played many different roles. Most recently he is the “Architectus Oryzus” for a small project team with big ideas and subscribes to the idea that running code is the system of truth. Ayan has a Master’s degree in Computer Engineering from University of Houston Clear Lake and holds PMP, PSM and OCMJEA certifications. He is also a speaker on various technical topics at local user groups and community events. He currently lives in Columbus Ohio where works with Quick Solutions Inc as a Sr. Consultant. In the digital world he can be found at http://daveayan.com.

Thanks to Northwoods for hosting us and providing lunch!

If you are planning to attend, please RSVP at – http://www.meetup.com/techlifecolumbus/events/138566102/

Meeting Details –

September meeting announcement – Developing an Automated Testing Strategy

There are many different kinds of automated tests you can write – unit tests, integration tests, acceptance tests, load tests… aaaah!!! How do you decide what approach you should take to testing your application? Do you really need all of these tests anyway? Where does QA fit in? Let’s walk through the thought process that you need to go through to make this decision for yourself and your team.

Please join us in September when Jon Kruger helps you develop Automation Strategy for your application and team.

Thanks to Quick Solutions for hosting us and providing lunch!

If you are planning to attend, please RSVP at – http://www.meetup.com/techlifecolumbus/events/123045212/

Meeting Details –