Twist, Agile Testing

The Twisty way of automating

by Ashwini Ingle - May 23, 2013

When I joined our employee web portal team as a quality analyst in mid-Jan, I was tasked to “automate ASAP and As Much As Possible”. Sounds familiar?

Read more

Agile Training & Coaching

Do we need a Business Analyst on an agile team?

by Bonna Choi - May 22, 2013

Out of many roles on an Agile team - developer, tester, project manager or product manager, the role of the business analyst is probably the one whose “existence” on the team is most frequently challenged. The role of a BA is often questioned, not the quality of work, but the “perceived” value delivered for the team - by clients. Frankly I’ve had a few identity crisis since I started working as an analyst on agile teams in 2006. 

Read more

Mingle, Agile Project Management

Using points is not the point

by Juliano Bersano - May 20, 2013

I have done 3 projects in a row where we did not use story points and simply counted stories. I’m a big advocate of that approach. Let me explain why.

I'm an estimation geek who loves the nuances of estimation, and have used function points, use case points, COCOMO, and story points for over 10 years. Over time, I’ve become convinced that the more we estimate past the very initial point, the less accurate we get. Additionally, long-drawn, “scientific” estimation exercises generate wrong expectations of certainty.

Read more

Twist, Agile Testing

Linking to story cards in project management tools from Twist reports

by Navaneeth KN - May 16, 2013

In this blog post, I will explain another useful example of Twist's customized HTML reports. Usually test scenarios are associated with story cards. Twist simplifies this by allowing scenarios to be tagged to stories.

Read more

Mingle, Agile Project Management

Rethinking building on the cloud: Part 3: Principles to maximize environments

by - May 14, 2013

As mentioned in my last blog, the newly launched Mingle SaaS runs entirely on the AWS cloud, for which we designed the architecture from scratch. Rethinking our approach to environments in the development and deployment process, has allowed us to shed a lot of problems experienced in traditional data center environments. Following the principles described here has increased the reliability of our system, streamlined our deployment process and sped up our development. There are three principles we follow to ensure that we maximize these benefits.

Read more

Mingle, Agile Project Management

How estimating with "story counts" worked for us

by Huimin Li - May 14, 2013

For about two years now, a norm has emerged on the Mingle team: “Every story is 4 points.” As a BA on our team, I quipped, “Well, that’s because our BAs are particularly good at writing stories.” :)... And then started digging into data to understand why.

Read more

Go, Continuous Delivery

Constraint driven automation - A Case Study

by Pavan Sudarshan - May 10, 2013

My last gig as a tech lead was on Bums on the Saddle, an ecommerce startup where we had to get a working piece of software with minimal functionality to production within a week. We then had to follow it up with frequent releases and be done with the minimum viable product (MVP) in 8 weeks. After the MVP we had to incorporate feedback and the store’s backend needs. We signed up for all of this and more in a Lean Startup style gig.

Read more