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Testing is the foundation of all development activities in a Lean organization. Lean organizations are often more aware of the pervasive role that testing plays in work and productivity. As a result, the Lean view of testing often has more breadth than many of the popular methodologies that we use to guide and manage software development, and tends to lead to less unintentional and unrealized loss of software development productivity.

This month at Lean Software Austin, Austin’s Lean Software community tackles the issue of testing in software development. We’ll examine many of the unmentioned and often unconscious assumptions that drive the way that we think of testing and the way that we do testing in our organizations. And we’ll differentiate Lean Testing from Agile Testing and the testing done in traditional, Waterfall-styled development. We’ll look at popular testing and development methodologies like Test-Driven Development, Acceptance Testing, and Exploratory Testing, and examine them in the light of Lean Software Development, gaining an understanding of how we use them and whether we can use them more effectively, as well as when to use them, or whether we should use them at all.

The shapes of our organizations and management chains are never immune to the cold light of inquiry at Lean Software Austin. We’ll dig into how our beliefs about necessities and entitlements obstruct us from more meaningful perspectives and employment of testing, and how our perspectives on testing obstruct us from more meaningful organization and process.

What we believe about the purpose of testing, and the means of testing has a tremendous impact on how much productivity is kept within reach of our software development organizations. Join Lean Software Austin this month for an interactive exploration of this topic, and begin your journey toward improving your team’s realization of productivity – no matter what methodology you use!