Agile Coach / Agile Test Competency Lead at Nationwide Insurance
Columbus, OH
United States
September 2010-December 2010
• Assisted in the Agile Hands-On Workshop (Introduction to Agile) for Nationwide associates.
• Performed standard work assessments for multiple Agile teams within Nationwide to ensure QA standards were being upheld.
• Participated in monthly meetings for selected test leads/test competency leads in sharing knowledge and identify ways to continue to refine and improve QA processes across the organization.
• Served as Agile Test Lead Coach for the Investment test team on Agile testing strategy and processes as they relate to data integration. The core team (fourteen members) as a whole was immature in the Agile process. The following bulleted list contains some of the activities that were involved with to help the team overcome their reluctance to Agile adoption.
• Gave several Agile workshops, namely story decomposition, story writing, acceptance criteria writing, estimation, acceptance test driven development (ATDD), etc., to transition the team from the mindset of waterfall to Agile.
• Tailored Agile process to work with data integration.
• Worked with the test lead to draft the Master Test Strategy document.
• Held workshops to entire team on the practice of Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD), which included the writing of acceptance criteria and acceptance test scenarios using Gherkin to drive development.
• Provided coaching objectives and roadmap to upper management in regards to testing.
• Provided soft skills coaching to the test lead to better prepare him for his role as coach/mentor to future Agile teams.
• Reiterated and reinforced Agile processes/principles to team on an on-going basis to ensure that they do not stray and revert back to waterfall.
• Served as Agile Test Competency Lead/Agile Coach for the Auto Policy team, which comprised of sixteen members. Like the Investment team, they are also immature in the Agile process. Only the leads had attended the Agile introductory workshop two weeks prior to the engagement and yet needed direction and coaching to implement what was learned. From initial observations and discussion with various team members, was able provide feedback to management regarding pain points and weaknesses within the team. Leveraged what was observed and put together workshops and sessions/discussions with appropriate team members to move the team forward in the right direction. Some of the coaching activities includes, but are not limited to, the following:
• Held workshops to address team’s top pain points, which included confusion around unit testing (scope) and acceptance level testing, user stories were not granular enough to fit within the iteration, acceptance criteria were too vague, unsure of how to handle errors and defects found, and incorrect estimation.
• Helped team to better organize the flow of the VMS (Visual Management System) board to show progress and transparency.
• Boosted team’s morale by bringing in toys and offered genuine praises to team for work well done.
• Provided training to team members on how to use Rational Team Concert for submitting/updating stories.
• Gave workshop to test team and Requirements Analyst Lead on how to write acceptance criteria as well as deriving test scenarios from acceptance criteria using Gherkin to drive development (ATDD).
• Provided soft skills coaching to the test lead to better prepare him for his role as coach/mentor to future Agile teams.
• Coached and mentored all of the team’s leads, namely Requirements Analyst Lead, Tech/Development Lead, Test Lead, and Iteration Manager on Agile Processes as they relate to their individual role.
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