AgileWay Continuous Testing Grading

A simple grading system to rate your Agile/DevOps maturity instantly!

(This article is an excerpt from my book “Practical Continuous Testing”)

DEFINITIONS

• AgileWay
  This means “do things in an agile way”, also the company I founded in 2006 when I discovered the revolutionary way (daily releases enabled by automated end-2-end testing) to do software development.
• Continuous Testing (CT)
  CT, simply speaking, is to run all automated end-2-end functional tests (at user-story level) as regression testing multiple times a day, to help software teams deliver high-quality software to production frequently.
• Grading
  Like the belt system in Taekwondo, to determine the level of competence and pursue advancements. Using a grading system in IT is not new, such as Google’s internal Test Certified Program (6 levels, see “How Google Tests Software” book, page 55), which weighs more on the technical level, such as test coverage (and is a more complex rating system compared to mine).

The purposes of AgileWay Continuous Testing Grading:

1. help identify fake Agile/DevOps practices and personnel, instantly
2. set directions for advancement to real Agile/DevOps

FACT: most so-called “Agile” projects are fake. I will borrow some (absolute) authorities here:

• “Agile now means, we do half of Scrum poorly and use Jira” — Andy Hunt (Co-author of Agile Manifesto)
• “Agile is Dead (Long Live Agility)” — Dave Thomas (co-author of Agile Manifesto)

I was in South Africa, at Agile Africa, and somebody came up to me and said “Well, we want to do software development, but we just can’t stand all this ceremony and Agile stuff. We just want to write some programs.” And tears came into my eyes…like…how can it be that we who set out to refocus development on essentials and get rid of stuff that didn’t matter, how can it be that we’re right back where we were 20 years ago? Like how can it be that “this is too much ceremony”? … No, this is wrong. I don’t know what to do about it.
— Kent Beck, Father of Agile, said in this interview (2019–10–15)