Agile Testing In Finance

Bank of America is one of the world's largest financial institutions and has one of the largest technology organisations in the world. Due to its size, it is incredibly an siloed place to work. In this talk Daniel will present how his team navigated though the organisation challenges and politics to create an award winning cash management/liquidity solution based on agile development and testing practices

Daniel Wood is a Technical Architect/Technical Project manager at Bank of America.

Software is everywhere today, and countless software products and projects die a slow death without ever making any impact. Today's planning and roadmap techniques expect the world to stand still while we deliver, and set products and projects up for failure from the very start. Even when they have good strategic plans, many organisations fail to communicate them and align everyone involved in delivery. The result is a tremendous amount of time and money wasted due to wrong assumptions, lack of focus, poor communication of objectives, lack of understanding and misalignment with overall goals. There has to be a better way to deliver! Gojko Adzic presents a possible solution, impact mapping, an innovative strategic planning method that can help you make an impact with software.

Getting good software specifications is a solved problem, and has been for years. Executable documents let you pin down requirements with no wriggle-room, yet give users the power to write and understand their own specs, which become your tests.

It's a shame executable documents are so hard for laypeople to author, for developers to support with fixture classes, and for anyone at all to refactor. It is time to make it easy, for the business and for us. We developers have been using Fit and its progeny for a decade now, so we know anti-patterns to avoid, there are new authoring tools available, and our favourite automations should be built-in to our new toolset.

In this session, Chris Agmen-Smith presents Pettswood, a tool with the goal to make executable documents a true drop-in solution for any project. He will show what it can do, and encourage you to use it, and perhaps even contribute to it.

Chris Agmen-Smith is an agile veteran with experience in finance (BNP Paribas, Barclays Global Investors, RBS and UBS), consultancy (Accenture) and real estate (Rightmove).

Matt Wynne will present Relish, a living documentation system for Cucumber. Relish helps your team get the most from Behaviour Driven Development, by publishing, browsing, searching, and organising your Cucumber features on the web.

Matt Wynne is an agile software development expert and the co-author of The Cucumber Book.

Working with people that have little or no experience with test automation makes it very obvious that test-automation tools with an intuitive feel to it are practically non-existant. Working in Agile software development just demands that you automate your work and have everybody involved, including business analists and functional testers. I am a great fan of FitNesse and have gotten used to most of it's annoyances, but in my experience of coaching teams it often turns out that these small annoyances can frustrate the entire process. A a coach I try to get people to participate in doing test automation but it turns out half of the coaching I do is actually tool support. The other half I spend convincing people that it is beneficial to collaborate on testcases/executable specifications, which is hard if people get scared of by incomprehensible tooling. Looking for solutions I finally convinced some colleagues to help me out to take FitNesse to a higher level. We have upgraded it's look to fit modern times, implemented a rich text editor and are currently working on a autocomplete function for fixture and scenario names. During this session I'd like to demonstrate our efforts.

Cirilo Wortel is a tester and trainer working for Xebia in the Netherlands. For the past six years he has been involved in Agile development working with only top-end development teams. Together with several collegues he developed Xebium a fixture that intuitively integrates webdriver in Fitnesse. The past year Cirilo was involved as the agile testing and test automation coach for a large scale agile adoption program at the Rabobank Netherlands.

Back in 2005, we started development of a replacement to a legacy system. A system that took 3 weeks to regression test. At that time we didn't know anything about ATDD, BDD, Executable Specifications, Outside-in or Inside-out but we started to automate and built up a suite of thousands of tests without much thought, we thought we were pretty good.

But then we started to see problems; the tests were always failing; the developer's were complaining about the effort needed to refactor; no-one really knew what any particular test did. We began to feel that perhaps automated testing wasn't living up to its reputation.

But with experience and time, we learned that we had made mistakes in our approach; too many tests, unstable tests, testing the wrong way and a tightly coupled and poorly understood set of tests.

Through examples, stories and code this presentation will describe the approach to get these tests under control, to build a ubiquitous language for testing types and to avoid many of the pitfalls that exist along the way.

Peter Thomas is the Lead Software Engineer for the Operations IT division of UBS Investment Bank. He has been involved in agile software development since 2005 and is has been leading the development of a multi-year programme with 15 teams, globally located developing a multi-component solution with over 10K automated tests to replace a large mainframe solution which took 3 weeks to regression test with, ahem, no automated tests.

Klarna is currently the fastest growing company in Sweden and the market leader in northern Europe for providing safe payment solutions to e-commerce websites. Klarna formed in 2005 with 3 founders, and we are now over 500 employes, all of them eager to make online shopping safer, simpler and more fun. I will talk about how our system has grown with the company and the challenges we have faced when more than doubling the size of the business each year, the challenges we face today and how we are handling them.

Erik Stenman is Klarna's Chief Scientist.

Most of the discussion on automated acceptance tests focuses on immediate benefits in development and defect detection or regression testing. But that's not nearly all you can get from your tests. While working on his new book, Gojko interviewed more than 50 teams that got big pay-offs from automated acceptance tests, including some that have been using agile acceptance testing for six or seven years. In the long term, most of these teams got quite unexpected benefits, such as being able to support their system easier, significantly change their business models or survive the absence of key business people. Gojko will talk about these long term benefits of acceptance tests and what you need to do to get them.