Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams

In this chapter, we share what you as a tester can do to help your team and your organization successfully deliver a high-quality product. The same process and tools can be used for shrink-wrapped products, customized solutions, or internal development products. Agile testers can make unique contributions that help both the customer and developer team define and produce the value that the business needs.

What Makes a Product?

Many of the books on agile development talk about the actual development cycle but neglect to talk about what makes a product and what it takes to successfully deliver that product. It’s not enough to just code, test, and say it’s done. It’s like buying something from a store: If there is great service to go with the purchase, how much more likely are you to go back and buy there again?

Janet’s Story

I was talking to my friend, Ron, who buys and sells coins. Over the years he has developed a very good reputation in the industry and has turned away prospective clients because he is so busy.

When I asked him his secret, he said, “It’s not a secret. I just work with my customers to make them feel comfortable and establish a trusting relationship with them. In the end, both I and my customer need to be happy with the deal. It only takes one unhappy customer to break my reputation.”

Agile teams can learn from Ron’s experience. If we treat our customers with respect and deliver a product they are happy with, we will have a good relationship with them, hopefully for many years.

—Janet

Our goal is to deliver value to the business in a timely manner. We don’t want just to meet requirements but also to delight our customers. Before we release, we want to make sure all of the deliverables are ready and polished up appropriately. Hopefully, you started planning early to meet not only the code requirements but to plan for training, documentation, and everything that goes into making a high-value product.

Fit and Finish

Coni Tartaglia, a software test manager with Primavera Systems, Inc., explains “fit and finish” deliverables.

It is helpful to have a “Fit and Finish” checklist. Sometimes fit and finish items aren’t ready to be included in the product until close to the end. It may be necessary to rebuild parts of the product to include items such as new artwork, license or legal agreements, digital signatures for executables, copyright dates, trademarks, and logos.

It is helpful to assemble these during the last full development iteration and incorporate them into the product while continuous integration build cycles are running so that extra builds are not needed later.

Business value is the goal of agile development. This can include lots beyond the production code. Teams need to plan for all aspects of product delivery.

Imagine yourself in the middle of getting your release ready for production. You’ve just finished your last iteration and are wrapping up your last story test. Your automated regression suite has been running on every new build, or at least on every nightly build. What you do now will depend on how disciplined your process has been. If you’ve been keeping to the “zero tolerance” for bugs, you’re probably in pretty good shape.

If you’re one of those teams that thinks you can leave bugs until the end to fix, you’re probably not in such good shape and may need to introduce an iteration for “hardening” or bug fixes. We don’t recommend this, but if your team has a lot of outstanding bugs that have been introduced during the development cycle, you need to get those addressed before you go into the end game. We find that new teams tend to fall into this trap.

In addition, there are lots of varied components to any release, some in the software, some not. You have customers who need to install and learn to use the new features. Think about all those elements that are critical to a successful release, because it’s time to wrap up all those loose ends and hone your product.

Bob Galen, an agile coach and end-game expert, observes that agile development may not have seeped into every organizational nook and cranny. He notes, “Agile testers can serve as a conduit or facilitator when it comes to physical delivery of the software.”

Planning Enough Time for Testing

Because testing and coding are part of one process in agile development, we’d prefer not to make special plans for extra testing time, but in real life we might need some extra time.