Author Archives: dev

Agile is not a process, it’s a philosophy or set of values to move quickly and easily. In this article I am going to discuss one of the effective agile planning and estimation method.

Planning Poker:

It is an Agile estimating technique which has become very popular in the last few years. Agile teams have taken advantage in using Planning poker cards as it is extremely simple to play and also powerful technique to extricate the collective wisdom of the team.

How to Play??

The basic rules are:

• Each participant gets a deck of cards as shown in the fig 1.2 which represents a sequence of numbers or the Fibonacci sequence (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc.), which is more popular.
• Product owner explains one User story from the Product Backlog to the team
• Product owner answers all the relevant questions that the team have got about the User story.
• Every participant selects a card which represents an estimate of the time, risk involved, complexity, and other relevant factors involved.
• When everybody are ready with an estimate, all the cards are presented on a board for finalizing.
• If there is a harmony /agreement on one particular number then the estimation is recorded and move to another User story.
• Repeat the same process for all the User stories in the product Backlog as shown in the fig 1.3

Reasons behind the success of using Planning poker:

• Estimates are done in groups, logic behind is simple – Each person in the team have different experience and different ideas, there by benefit of teams collective intelligence.
• Strengthen collaboration by engaging entire team.
• Creates harmony in estimating rather than having a single person control the estimate.
• Reveal issues early through timely discussions for each story.

Conclusion:

By following the correct process and making an estimate for each User story allows the team to understand clearly how much the team can deliver the working software at the end of each Sprint/iteration.

Hope you enjoyed reading…have a great day.

Sujatha Nalluri

Test Analyst

Adactin Group

Web accessibility is a practice of making Web sites accessible to all, particularly those with disabilities. As the Internet becomes a central part of Technology, it is imperative that Technology must be designed and developed in such a way that it provides equal access and usability to every member of target audience. It is becoming increasingly important for government and educational institutions as they try to meet their obligations under the Disability Discrimination Act and various policies and guidelines for online web publishing/hosting.

Accessibility testing seeks to cater to different disabilities affecting:

• Vision e.g. visual blindness
• Auditory e.g. deafness
• Mobility e.g. spinal cord injuries
• Cognition e.g. autism and dementia

“Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0 and 2.0” is part of a series of accessibility guidelines published by the Web Accessibility Initiative .It has 3 levels along with a list of checkpoints like

• Level A
• Level AA
• Level AAA

In summation, these guidelines were developed to promote equal accessibility and how to use multimedia content more accessible to a wider audience. Within accessibility testing, the areas that need to be tested are:

• Text alternatives
• Keyboard operability
• Document structure/heading levels
• CSS contrast/element styles
• Forms and tables

There are various tools that can be used to aid accessibility testing:

• WAVE
• Achecker
• JAWS – a screen reader
• The Colour Contrast Analyser
• EvalAccess
• FAE (Functionality Accessibility Evaluator)
• PDF Accessibility Checker (PAC)

Despite the availability of testing tools, it does not provide a definitive assessment. As a result, manual testing does need to be conducted.

Although accessibility testing is primarily applied to educational and governmental sectors, it should be employed in the private sector as it could improve the marketing and its profits.

Good Luck!

Shashi Chaudhary

Senior Test Analyst

Adactin Group