Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams

As a tester on an agile team, you’re a key player in releasing code to production, just as you might have been in a more traditional environment. You might run scripts or do manual testing to verify all elements of a release, such as database update scripts, are in place. All team members participate in retrospectives or other process improvement activities that might occur for every iteration or every release. The whole team brainstorms ways to solve problems and improve processes and practices.

Agile projects have a variety of flavors. Is your team starting with a clean slate, in a greenfield (new) development project? If so, you might have fewer challenges than a team faced with rewriting or building on a legacy system that has no automated regression suite. Working with a third party brings additional testing challenges to any team.

Whatever flavor of development you’re using, pretty much the same elements of a software development life cycle need to happen. The difference with agile is that time frames are greatly shortened, and activities happen concurrently. Participants, tests, and tools need to be adaptive.

The most critical difference for testers in an agile project is the quick feedback from testing. It drives the project forward, and there are no gatekeepers ready to block project progress if certain milestones aren’t met.

We’ve encountered testers who resist the transition to agile development, fearing that “agile development” equates with chaos, lack of discipline, lack of documentation, and an environment that is hostile to testers. While some teams do seem to use the “agile” buzzword to justify simply doing whatever they want, true agile teams are all about repeatable quality as well as efficiency. In our experience, an agile team is a wonderful place to be a tester.

Whole-Team Approach

One of the biggest differences in agile development versus traditional development is the agile “whole-team” approach. With agile, it’s not only the testers or a quality assurance team who feel responsible for quality. We don’t think of “departments,” we just think of the skills and resources we need to deliver the best possible product. The focus of agile development is producing high-quality software in a time frame that maximizes its value to the business. This is the job of the whole team, not just testers or designated quality assurance professionals. Everyone on an agile team gets “test-infected.” Tests, from the unit level on up, drive the coding, help the team learn how the application should work, and let us know when we’re “done” with a task or story.

An agile team must possess all the skills needed to produce quality code that delivers the features required by the organization. While this might mean including specialists on the team, such as expert testers, it doesn’t limit particular tasks to particular team members. Any task might be completed by any team member, or a pair of team members. This means that the team takes responsibility for all kinds of testing tasks, such as automating tests and manual exploratory testing. It also means that the whole team thinks constantly about designing code for testability.

The whole-team approach involves constant collaboration. Testers collaborate with programmers, the customer team, and other team specialists—and not just for testing tasks, but other tasks related to testing, such as building infrastructure and designing for testability. Figure 1-5 shows a developer reviewing reports with two customers and a tester (not pictured).

Figure 1-5 A developer discusses an issue with customers

The whole-team approach means everyone takes responsibility for testing tasks. It means team members have a range of skill sets and experience to employ in attacking challenges such as designing for testability by turning examples into tests and into code to make those tests pass. These diverse viewpoints can only mean better tests and test coverage.

Most importantly, on an agile team, anyone can ask for and receive help. The team commits to providing the highest possible business value as a team, and the team does whatever is needed to deliver it. Some folks who are new to agile perceive it as all about speed. The fact is, it’s all about quality—and if it’s not, we question whether it’s really an “agile” team.

Your situation is unique. That’s why you need to be aware of the potential testing obstacles your team might face and how you can apply agile values and principles to overcome them.

Summary

Understanding the activities that testers perform on agile teams helps you show your own team the value that testers can add. Learning the core practices of agile testing will help your team deliver software that delights your customers.

In this chapter, we’ve explained what we mean when we use the term “agile testing.