Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams

If you want to know how agile values, principles, and practices applied to testing can help you, as a tester, do your best work, and help your team deliver more business value, please keep reading. If you’ve bothered to pick up this book, you’re probably the kind of professional who continually strives to grow and learn. You’re likely to have the mind-set that a good agile team needs to succeed. This book will show you ways to improve your organization’s product, provide the most value possible to your team, and enjoy your job.

Lisa’s Story

During a break from working on this chapter, I talked to a friend who works in quality assurance for a large company. It was a busy time of year, and management expected everyone to work extra hours. He said, “If I thought working 100 extra hours would solve our problems, I’d work ‘til 7 every night until that was done. But the truth was, it might take 4,000 extra hours to solve our problems, so working extra feels pointless.” Does this sound familiar?

—Lisa

If you’ve worked in the software industry long, you’ve probably had the opportunity to feel like Lisa’s friend. Working harder and longer doesn’t help when your task is impossible to achieve. Agile development acknowledges the reality that we only have so many good productive hours in a day or week, and that we can’t plan away the inevitability of change.

Agile development encourages us to solve our problems as a team. Business people, programmers, testers, analysts—everyone involved in software development—decides together how best to improve their product. Best of all, as testers, we’re working together with a team of people who all feel responsible for delivering the best possible quality, and who are all focused on testing. We love doing this work, and you will too.

When we say “agile testing” in this book, we’re usually talking about business-facing tests, tests that define the business experts’ desired features and functionality. We consider “customer-facing” a synonym for “business-facing.” “Testing” in this book also includes tests that critique the product and focus on discovering what might be lacking in the finished product so that we can improve it. It includes just about everything beyond unit and component level testing: functional, system, load, performance, security, stress, usability, exploratory, end-to-end, and user acceptance. All these types of tests might be appropriate to any given project, whether it’s an agile project or one using more traditional methodologies.

Agile testing doesn’t just mean testing on an agile project. Some testing approaches, such as exploratory testing, are inherently agile, whether it’s done an agile project or not. Testing an application with a plan to learn about it as you go, and letting that information guide your testing, is in line with valuing working software and responding to change. Later chapters discuss agile forms of testing as well as “agile testing” practices.

A Little Context for Roles and Activities on an Agile Team

We’ll talk a lot in this book about the “customer team” and the “developer team.” The difference between them is the skills they bring to delivering a product.

Customer Team

The customer team includes business experts, product owners, domain experts, product managers, business analysts, subject matter experts—everyone on the “business” side of a project. The customer team writes the stories or feature sets that the developer team delivers. They provide the examples that will drive coding in the form of business-facing tests. They communicate and collaborate with the developer team throughout each iteration, answering questions, drawing examples on the whiteboard, and reviewing finished stories or parts of stories.

Testers are integral members of the customer team, helping elicit requirements and examples and helping the customers express their requirements as tests.

Developer Team

Everyone involved with delivering code is a developer, and is part of the developer team. Agile principles encourage team members to take on multiple activities; any team member can take on any type of task. Many agile practitioners discourage specialized roles on teams and encourage all team members to transfer their skills to others as much as possible. Nevertheless, each team needs to decide what expertise their projects require. Programmers, system administrators, architects, database administrators, technical writers, security specialists, and people who wear more than one of these hats might be part of the team, physically or virtually.

Testers are also on the developer team, because testing is a central component of agile software development. Testers advocate for quality on behalf of the customer and assist the development team in delivering the maximum business value.

Interaction between Customer and Developer Teams