Search for transparency

Description

Transparency is one of the pillars of Scrum along with inspection and adaptation [Schwaber 2020]. It makes the work done visible. Without transparency, inspection is impossible, the true state of the elements produced is misleading and can lead to bad decisions.

This quest for transparency leads the team to :

• providing the conditions under which User Stories (US) are accepted, notably through the DoD and other acceptance criteria for each US
• establish a coding standard with which the code is considered "acceptable", which is all the more true when the product generated is large, so much so that one of the SAFe doctrines is "you can't scale crappy code" [SAFe 2021-19] [SAFe 2021-20
• improve the testability of the elements produced at all levels

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Application to test maturity

Testability can be seen from four directions [Moustier 2020]:

• its means, technical testability
• its accessibility, extrinsic testability
• its internal means, intrinsic testability
• its diffusion, social testability

These different parts contribute to establishing transparency about the product and the activities that generate it.

The technical side of testability encourages the design of a product that integrates quality from the outset [SAFe 2021-19] [SAFe 2021-20], using a ubiquitous language that allows transparency and comprehensibility of the elements produced by the actors in the field.

This technical testability can be found in particular :

• at the level of a GUI or an API (of a service or even a library) which enables the correct execution of a functionality to be verified (e.g. a message which provides information on the correct execution of an action)
• at the level of logs, which contain traces of the activities and errors encountered

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When a technical means of testing is directly accessible at its level, it constitutes extrinsic testability; when this means requires going into layers of the application that are hidden from the client at the addressed level, the testability is then qualified as intrinsic.

Whatever the means and the level of accessibility of a testability, if it is known only to one person, it will remain untestable. This is the social side of testability that Scrum summarises under the term transparency. Its disclosure can be done formally through documents but also informally, it is tacit knowledge [Nonaka 1998].

Agilitest's position on this practice

Agilitest's benefits lie in automatic verification, mainly at the level of :

• GUIs accessible via a browser, a mobile phone or a Windows or iOS application
• REST APIs

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But Agilitest is also able to interface with performance testing tools such as Octoperf [Cressend 2020].

Its open source engine, available on Github [Pierrehub2b 2021], allows for the execution of scenarios available to anyone, without licensing costs, and thus promotes the social side of testability and transparency of product quality.

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To discover the whole set of practices, click here.

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