Technodrone

Wow, there are so many bad things happening here that I'm on my fourth revision of this comment.

The reality of the situation is that a new development process has been mandated on a team during a project that's under a tight deadline. Bad idea.

Your role is fairly straightforward: Start your unit testing on the most critical areas of the application first. Reassure management that the unit tests will deal directly with product quality. Tell the developers that you are supporting them by helping to test areas that need testing the most.

The best thing you could do, I think, is to understand that Agile isn't about following a formula. It's about adopting those parts of the process that help you the most.

Adding unproductive meetings, useless tests, and a large learning curve in the middle of a project isn't Agile. It's stupid. You might as well tell everyone to switch to the Dvorak keyboard layout because it's more efficient.

So, my parting suggestions:
1. Ask the developers to identify or rank those areas of the application that would benefit from the most testing. Focus the unit tests on those areas first.
2. Using TDD/Agile means you should be taking measurements that help you track code quality and schedule. Find out what metrics your team is gathering and see if the anxiety around the schedule is justified.
3. Lastly, why was Agile decided for this project at this time? Was it to get the project done faster? Increase quality? Find those aspects of Agile that lend themselves to the top priority and try to have your consultant emphasize those.

Good luck!

Thanks for you comments/suggestions. One thing I forgot to mention is that I ran a demo yesterday with the product owner and management and quite a bit of the promised functionality didn't work. I have been involved in agile projects for the last 3 years and never saw a product owner actually look they were going to faint after the demo. We did our retrospective after the demo and the consultant drug that meeting on for two hours and we still didn't get finished. Obviously management wanted actions items and we just talked for 3 hours.. He doesn't seem to really care that people will lose jobs if this product does not get out. It is going to get interesting because I am going to concentrate on essential bug fixing and testing both unit and manual for those who are experienced writing unit test. I am going to set a timer during the morning standup meeting and I am leaving after the timer goes off. I am not going to attend any "learning sessions" to talk about scrum philosophy. It is just not the time and place for that right now.

Wow!!! I have been reading Pragrmatic Thinking & Learning by Andy Hunt. The first two chapters deals with this exact situation. I now see why trying to implement agile with novice programmers if futile. This book rocks I recommend that all developers that care about their craft read it. It would be great if IT managers read it also.

Thx, Denise. I found an interesting reading for this weekend.

PS: 70-536 passed. Now it's time to move forward mcts ;)

Congratulations on passing 70-536. I haven't been studying for it. I recently changed jobs and have been concentrating on agile and code refactoring. I would still like to get a certification.