Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams

Some agile teams get value from commercial or open source test tools, while others prefer a completely customized approach. Many testers find value writing simple scripts in a scripting language such as Ruby, or a shell, to automate mundane but necessary tasks, generate test data, or drive other tools. Books such as Everyday Scripting with Ruby for Teams, Testers, and You give a roadmap for this approach. If you’re a tester without a strong programming background, we encourage you to pick up a book, find an online tutorial, or take a class on a scripting language, and see how easy it can be to write useful scripts.

See more examples of specific tools for business-facing tests in Chapter 9, “Toolkit for Business-Facing Tests that Support the Team.”

What we’re trying to tell you is that you can use many different tools. Look at the problem you are trying to solve and decide as a team the easiest and most effective way to solve it. Every so often, step back and take a look at the tools you’re using. Is everyone on the team happy with them? Are you missing problems because you don’t have the right tools? Budget time to explore new tools and see if they might fill gaps or replace a tool that isn’t paying off.

If your team is new to agile development, or working on a brand-new project, you might be faced with choosing tools and setting up test environments during the early iterations, when you also might be working on high-risk stories. Don’t expect to be able to deliver much business value if you’re still creating your test infrastructure. Plan in lots of time for evaluating tools, setting up build processes, and experimenting with different test approaches.

Applying Agile Principles to Test Automation

Every team, every project, and every organization has a unique situation with unique automation challenges. Each has its own culture, history, resources, business pressures, products, and experience. No matter what your team’s situation, you can use the agile principles and values discussed in Chapter 2 to help you find solutions. Concepts such as courage, feedback, simplicity, communication, continuous improvement, and responding to change aren’t just agile ideas—they’re qualities that are common to all successful teams.

Keep It Simple

The agile maxim of “do the simplest thing that could possibly work” applies to tests as well as code. Keep the test design simple, keep the scope minimal, and use the simplest tool that will do the job.

Simplicity is a core agile value for a good reason. The best place to start is the simplest approach you can think of. However, doing the simplest thing doesn’t mean doing the easiest thing. It involves really thinking about what you need now and taking baby steps to get there. By keeping things simple, if you do make a bad choice, you won’t go too far off track before realizing the error of your ways.

It’s easy to get involved in a task and slip away from the basics into some intriguing challenge. Weigh the ROI of every automation task before you do it. Automation is fun (when you get past the scary part of getting started). It’s tempting to try something difficult just because you can. Like all other aspects of testing in an agile development project, the only way to keep up is to do only the minimum required.

Use the simplest tool you can get away with. Remember the test pyramid. If a customer-facing test can be most easily automated at the unit level, do it there. Lisa sometimes writes test cases in FitNesse, only to learn the programmers can automate them much faster as JUnit tests. Conversely, sometimes the programmers use FitNesse for TDD instead of JUnit, because the code they’re writing lends itself to testing in one of the FitNesse fixture formats.

Iterative Feedback

Short iterations allow us to experiment with various automation approaches, evaluate results, and change course as quickly as needed. Commit to an automation effort, such as developing a test framework in-house or implementing an open source tool for at least a couple of iterations. After each iteration, look at what’s working and what’s not working. Think of ideas to overcome problems, and try those in the next iteration. If it’s not the right solution, try something else for a few iterations. Don’t get sucked into a quagmire where you’ve put so many resources into a tool, and have so many tests that use it, that you feel you can’t switch tools. Between the many open source and commercial tools, plus programmers’ ability to write home-grown test tools, there’s no reason to settle for less than the optimum tool.

Lisa’s Story