Yesterday I attended a Waterloo Agile Lean session on Story Mapping presented by Mark Levison. I had heard of Story Mapping but hadn't worked through it before. I liked the hands-on exercises approach Mark took to help us understand the process and benefits of that technique. This blog post is not about Story Mapping.
I love learning and take any opportunity I can to hear different speakers present on topics that I think may be of value. Sometimes I even attend the same talks and workshops when they are done by different speakers so that I can understand differences of style in presentation, stories, and tips/techniques for getting the ideas across to the audience/participants. Once I even attended the same topic by the same speaker 2 days in a row, and I learned something new/different the second time around! (It was a Cem Kaner talk when he was in our area a few years ago.)
Yes, I gained an appreciation of Story Mapping yesterday. More importantly, I learned a new anecdote from the speaker - one that got me thinking. At one point, Mark answered a question about managing a large backlog on a Scrum/Kanban-style (information radiator) board. The problem with really large backlogs of stuff to do (likely anything with more than 100 items in it), is that the items near the bottom become meaningless over time. You will probably never get to them because something more important always comes up.
Showing posts with label time. Show all posts
Showing posts with label time. Show all posts
Using MS Outlook to support SBTM
Okay, to recap, Session-Based Test Management (SBTM) is a test framework to help you manage and measure your Exploratory Testing (ET) effort. There are 4 basic elements that make this work: (1) Charter or mission (the purpose that drives the current testing effort), (2) Time-boxed periods (the 'sessions'), (3) Reviewable result, and (4) Debrief. There are many different ways that you might implement or apply these elements in your team or testing projects.
Let's take a look at tracking the testing effort from strictly a Project Management perspective. Years ago, when I first became a test manager, I was introduced to the idea of the 60% 'productive' work day as a factor to consider when estimating effort applied to project schedules. That is, in a typical 8-hour workday you don't really get 8 complete, full hours of work from someone. I don't believe it's mentally possible to get that. The brain needs a break, as does the body, and there are many natural distractions in the workplace (meetings, email, breaks, support calls, stability of the code or environments, and so on), so the reality is that the number of productive working hours for each employee is actually something less than the total number of hours they're physically present in the workplace.
That 'productivity' factor changes with each person, their role and responsibilities, the number of projects in the queue, and so on. Applying some statistical averaging to my past experiences, I find that 60% seems about right for a tester dedicated to a single project. I have worked with some teams that have been more productive and some much less.
So what does this look like? If we consider an 8-hour day, 60% is 4.8 hours. I'm going to toss in an extra 15 minute break or distraction and say that it works out to about 4.5 hours of productive work from a focussed employee in a typical 8-hour day. Again, it depends on the person and the tasks that they're performing, so this is just an averaging factor.
Let's take a look at tracking the testing effort from strictly a Project Management perspective. Years ago, when I first became a test manager, I was introduced to the idea of the 60% 'productive' work day as a factor to consider when estimating effort applied to project schedules. That is, in a typical 8-hour workday you don't really get 8 complete, full hours of work from someone. I don't believe it's mentally possible to get that. The brain needs a break, as does the body, and there are many natural distractions in the workplace (meetings, email, breaks, support calls, stability of the code or environments, and so on), so the reality is that the number of productive working hours for each employee is actually something less than the total number of hours they're physically present in the workplace.
That 'productivity' factor changes with each person, their role and responsibilities, the number of projects in the queue, and so on. Applying some statistical averaging to my past experiences, I find that 60% seems about right for a tester dedicated to a single project. I have worked with some teams that have been more productive and some much less.
So what does this look like? If we consider an 8-hour day, 60% is 4.8 hours. I'm going to toss in an extra 15 minute break or distraction and say that it works out to about 4.5 hours of productive work from a focussed employee in a typical 8-hour day. Again, it depends on the person and the tasks that they're performing, so this is just an averaging factor.
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