Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams

Don’t be afraid to get something—anything—in place, even if it’s somewhat deficient. The most important factor in success is to just get started. Many, if not most, successful teams have started with a poor process but managed to turn an inadequate process into something truly essential to the team’s success, one piece at a time. As with so many aspects of agile testing, improving in tiny increments is the key to success.

If you don’t start somewhere, you’ll never get traction on automation. Get the whole team together and start an experiment. Without the right level of test automation, your team can’t do its best work. You need the right test automation to deliver business value frequently. A year or two from now, you’ll wonder why you thought test automation was so hard.

Summary

In this chapter, we considered how to apply agile values, principles, and practices to develop an automation strategy. We discussed the following subjects related to automation:

Use the agile testing quadrants to help identify where you need test automation, and when you’ll need it.

The test automation pyramid can help your team make the right investments in test automation that will pay off the most.

Apply agile values, principles, and practices to help your team get traction on test automation.

Repetitive tasks, continuous integration and build processes, unit tests, functional tests, load tests, and data creation are all good candidates for automation.

Quadrant 3 tests such as usability testing and exploratory testing may benefit from some automation to set up test scenarios and analyze results, but human instincts, critical thinking, and observation can’t be automated.

A simple, whole-team approach, using iterative feedback, and taking enough time can help you get started on a good solution.

When developing an automation strategy, start with the greatest area of pain, consider a multi-layered approach, and strive for continuously revisiting and improving your strategy rather than achieving perfection from the start.

Consider risk and ROI when deciding what to automate.

Take time to learn by doing; apply agile coding practices to tests.

Decide whether you can simply build inputs in-memory, or whether you need production-style data in a database.

Supply test data that will allow tests to be independent, rerunnable, and as fast as possible.

Take on one tool need at a time, identify your requirements, and decide what type of tool to choose or build that fits your needs.

Use good development practices for test automation, and take time for good test design.

Automated tools need to fit into the team’s development infrastructure.

Version-control automated tests along with the production code that they verify.

Good test management ensures that tests can provide effective documentation of the system and of development progress.

Get started on test automation today.

Part V An Iteration in the Life of a Tester

Whenever we do tutorials, webinars, or Q&A sessions with participants who are relatively new to agile development, we’re always asked questions such as “What do testers do during the first part of an iteration before anything’s ready to test?” or “Where does user acceptance testing fit into an agile release cycle?” It’s easy to expound on theories of who should do what and when, in an agile process, but we find giving concrete examples from our own experience is the best help we can give agile newbies. Through our talking to many different agile teams, we’ve learned that there’s a lot of commonality in what works well for agile development and testing.

In this part of the book, we’ll follow an agile tester’s life throughout an iteration. Actually, we’ll explore more than just an iteration. We’ll start with what testers do during release or theme planning, when the team looks at the work it will do for several upcoming iterations. We’ll give examples of what testers can do to help the team members hit the ground running when they start the iteration. We’ll show how coding and testing are part of one integrated process of delivering software, and we’ll describe how testers and programmers work closely and incrementally. We’ll explain different ways that testers can help their teams stay on track and gauge progress, including useful approaches to metrics and handling defects. We’ll look at testing-related activities involved in wrapping up an iteration and finding ways to improve for the next one. Finally, we’ll examine a tester’s role in a successful release, including the end game, UAT, packaging, documentation, and training.