My Innovative Solution to Agile: Automation-Assisted Showcase

Make every showcase a successful one.

This is included in the “My Innovative Solution to Test Automation and Continuous Testing” series.

In 2015, I worked (as the test lead) on one project that took the showcase quite seriously (at least the project manager planned to). The showcases for the first two sprints went quite well. The highlight of the showcase was, of course, a demonstration of implemented (or changed) user stories by business analysts. However, the business analysts’ demonstration started showing signs of struggling since Sprint #3.

The reason was simple. The user stories implemented were simple and straightforward ones, such as: ‘user login’, ‘user sign up’, ‘applicant can fill the form’, …, etc, which are easy to demonstrate. Along with the development, the user stories (of new sprints) are dependent on previous ones. For example, “Manager can reject the application” needs a newly submitted application first. Therefore, the business analysts had to spend growing time preparing test data for the showcase demonstrations. It seemed still manageable.

However, showcase #5 went quite badly. The problem was not test-data preparation, rather, the business analyst forgot one user’s password when switching users. Then, he panicked…