Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams

We cannot stress enough that you need to know your team and its needs.

Automated Test List

Sometimes you may be required to present more information to your customers, such as a list of test cases. If your team has a tool from which you could extract a list of test case names, you could provide this list easily to anyone who needed it. This would present more of a traditional type detailed test plan but wouldn’t be available until after tests were actually written. We don’t recommend spending any time on this because we don’t see added value, but sometimes this list may be required for risk assessment or auditability.

Preparing for Visibility

If your team is just getting started with agile development, make sure you have necessary infrastructure in place for your early iterations. You may change the way you are tracking progress as you go along, and your retrospectives will help you bring these issues to light. If you’re having problems completing the work planned for each iteration, maybe you need more visible charts or visual aids to help you gauge progress and make mid-iteration adjustments. Do your customers have some way to know how the iteration is progressing and which stories are done? Take time before the each iteration to evaluate whether you’re getting the right kind of feedback to keep track of testing.

Tracking Test Tasks and Status

The effective agile teams we know all follow this simple rule: “No story is done until it’s tested.” This rule can be expanded to say that not only must the story be tested, the code must be checked in, it must have automated tests that are run by a continual build process, it must be documented, or whatever your team’s “doneness” criteria are. At any time during an iteration, you need to be able to quickly assess how much testing work remains on each story, and which stories are “done.” Story or task boards are ideal for this purpose, especially if they use color-coding to denote test tasks vs. development and other types of tasks. Cork boards, steel sheets with magnets, poster-sized sticky notes, or whiteboards all work fine. Give each story its own row, and order them by priority. Have columns for “to do,” “work in progress,” “verify,” and “done.”

Janet’s Story

I started with team members who had been doing agile for a few months with only a couple of programmers and one tester. They had been using XPlanner to track their tasks and stories, and it was working ok for them. At the same time I came on board, a couple of new programmers were added, and the stand-ups became less effective; the team was not completing the stories it had planned. I suggested a storyboard, and although they were skeptical about keeping two sets of “tasks,” they said they would try it.

We took an open wall and used stickies to create our story board. We started having stand-ups in front of the story board and our discussion became more specific. It provided a nice visible way of knowing when the tasks were done and what was left to do. After a couple of months, the team grew again and we had to move the story board into an office. We also moved our stand-ups and our test result charts there. However, the constant visibility was lost, and programmers and testers stopped moving their tasks.

We had to reevaluate what we wanted to do. One size does not fit all teams. Make sure you plan for what is right for your team.

—Janet

Some teams use different colored index cards for the different types of tasks: green for testing, white for coding, yellow and red for bugs. Other teams use one card per development task, and add different colored stickers to show that testing is in progress or show that there are bugs to resolve. Use any method that lets you see at a quick glance how many stories are “done,” with all coding, database, testing, and other tasks completed. As the iteration progresses, it’s easy to see if the team is on track, or if you need to pull a story out or have programmers pitch in on testing tasks.

Janet’s Story

Our story board (shown in Figure 15-8) wasn’t very big, and we didn’t have a lot of wall space to expand to have the regular column-type task board. Instead, we decided to use stickers to designate the status.

Figure 15-8 Example story board