Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams

A lightweight, agile test plan can help make sure all of the testing considerations are addressed during the life of the release or project.

Consider alternatives to test plans that might be more appropriate for your team; test matrices, spreadsheets, or even a whiteboard may be sufficient.

Formal release planning may not be appropriate for your situation. In the absence of release planning, consider identifying and discussing at least the first few stories that should be done first.

Plan for what metrics you want to capture for the life of the release; think about what problem you are trying to solve and capture only those metrics that are meaningful for your team.

Chapter 16 Hit the Ground Running

In agile development, we generally like to do tasks “just in time.” We can’t see around the curves in the road ahead, so we focus on the activities at hand. Then again, we want to hit the ground running when we start each new iteration. That may require a little preparation. Baking is a good analogy here. You decide you want to bake cookies because someone is coming over. Before you start, you make sure you have the right ingredients. If you don’t, you either go buy what you need, or you choose a different kind to make.

Don’t go overboard—if a pre-iteration activity doesn’t save time during the iteration, or help you do a better job, don’t do it before the iteration. Do what is appropriate for your team, and keep experimenting. Maybe you’ll do some of these activities after the iteration starts instead. Here are some ideas to think about that might help you “bake quality in” to your product.

Be Proactive

In Chapter 2, “Ten Principles of an Agile Tester,” we explained how agile testers have to shift their mind-set. Instead of waiting for work to come to us, we develop a proactive attitude where we get up and go look for ways to contribute. With the fast and constant pace of agile development, it’s easy to get immersed in the current iteration’s stories. We are so busy making sure we’ve covered the features with up-front tests, performing exploratory testing to be sure we’ve understood the business requirements, and automating adequate regression tests, it’s hard to think of anything else. However, it’s sometimes appropriate to take a bit of time to help our customers and our team prepare for the next iteration. When our team is about to break new ground, or work on complex and risky stories, some work before the iteration can help maximize our team’s velocity and minimize frustration.

We sure don’t want to spend all our time in meetings, or planning for stories that might be re-prioritized. However, if we can make our iteration planning go faster, and reduce the risk of the stories we’re about to undertake, it’s worth doing some research and brainstorming before we start the iteration.

Benefits

Working on stories in advance of the iteration may be especially useful for teams that are split across different geographic locations. By working ahead, there’s time to get information to everyone and give them a chance to give their input.

The problem is that we’re so busy during each short agile iteration that it’s hard to find time to meet about the next iteration’s stories, much less start writing test cases. If your iterations always go smoothly, with stories delivered incrementally and plenty of time to test, and the delivered software matches customer expectations, you may not need to take time to prepare in advance. If your team has trouble finishing stories, or ends up with big mismatches between actual and desired behavior of features, a little advance planning may save you time during the iteration.

Lisa’s Story