Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams

If our theme is providing the ability for an online shopper to choose shipping options and then calculate the shipping cost based on weight, shipping speed, and destination, it may be a good idea to complete simple stories or even subsets of stories so that the checkout process can proceed end-to-end. Start by only allowing standard 5-day shipping, items less than 10 pounds, and destinations in the continental United States. When the user can get the shipping cost for that scenario and check out, the team can decide the next priorities. They may include heavyweight items, faster shipping speeds, shipping to Hawaii and Alaska, and shipping to Canada and Mexico.

By providing this thin slice first, the testers have something to start testing immediately. The programmers have also tested their design and code integration steps and so have a solid idea of how things will work when the whole feature is complete.

Testing Considerations While Prioritizing

It is important that the team understands the big picture or theme. In our example, team members know the stories for shipping outside the continental United States will come later. This knowledge may affect how they implement the first story. This doesn’t mean they have to plan for every eventuality, but if they know they need more shipping options, they may implement a drop-down list rather than a basic text field. No need to make more work or rework than necessary.

During release planning, we also consider the relative risk of the stories. If certain stories have many unknowns, it might be best to include them in an early iteration, so there’s time to recover if a story “blows up” and takes much more time than estimated. The same may apply to a story which, if not completed or implemented incorrectly, would have a costly negative impact. Scheduling it early will leave more time for testing.

If new technology or software is needed, it might be good to learn it by developing a straightforward story and plan more difficult ones for later iterations. This new technology may or may not affect your test automation. You may want more time to check out the impact. If the features are all brand new and the team needs more time to understand how they should work, plan to do less than your average velocity for the first iteration. That way, you’ll have more time to write tests that will correctly guide development. Identify risks and decide what approach makes the most sense from a testing perspective as well as a development perspective. This is one of the reasons it is important to include the whole team in the planning sessions.

Looking at the stories from a testing viewpoint is essential. This is where testers add the most value. The team needs to develop in small, testable chunks in order to help decide what stories are tentatively planned for which iteration. The key here is testable. Many new agile teams think small chunks means doing all of the database work first, or all of the configuration stuff. Testable doesn’t necessarily mean it needs a GUI either. For example, the algorithm that calculates shipping cost is an independent piece of code that can be tested independently of any user interface but requires extensive testing. That might be a good story for the first iteration. It can be tested as free-standing code and then later tested in combination with the UI and other parts of the system.

The testers may lobby for getting an end-to-end tracer bullet through the code quickly, so they can build an automation framework, and then flesh it out as the story development proceeds. If there are stories that present a big testing challenge, it might be good to do those early on. For example, if the release includes implementing a new third-party tool to create documents from templates and dynamic data, there are many permutations to test. If the team is unfamiliar with the tool, the testers can ask the team to consider doing those stories in the first iteration of the release.

What’s in Scope?

Agile teams continually manage scope in order to meet business deadlines while preserving quality. High-value stories are the first priority. Stories that are “nice-to-haves” might be elbowed out of the release.

Lisa’s Story