Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams

Chapter 9, “Toolkit for Business-Facing Tests that Support the Team,” and Chapter 11, “Critiquing the Product Using Technology-Facing Tests,” give examples of test tools.

Simple doesn’t mean easy. For testers, it means testing “just enough” with the lightest-weight tools and techniques we can find that will do the job. Tools can be as simple as a spreadsheet or a checklist. We need to automate regression tests, but we should push them down to the lowest level possible in order to encourage fast feedback. Even simple smoke tests might be enough for business-facing test automation.

Exploratory testing can be used to learn about your application and ferret out hard-to-find bugs, but start with the basics, time-boxing side trips and evaluating how far to go with edge cases. Simplicity helps us keep our focus on risk, return on investment, and improving in the areas of greatest pain.

Part IV, “Test Automation,” explains how to build a “doable” test automation strategy.

Practice Continuous Improvement

Looking for ways to do a better job is part of an agile tester’s mind-set. Of course, the whole team should be thinking this way, because the central core of agile is that the team always tries to do better work. Testers participate in team retrospectives, evaluating what’s working well and what needs to be added or tweaked. Testers bring testing issues up for the whole team to address. Teams have achieved their greatest improvements in testing and all other areas through the use of process improvement practices such as retrospectives and impediment backlogs. Some improvement ideas might become task cards. For larger problems, teams focus on one or two issues at a time to make sure they solve the real problem and not just the symptom.

Agile testers and their teams are always on the lookout for tools, skills, or practices that might help them add more value or get a better return on the customer’s investment. The short iterations of agile development make it easier to try something new for a few iterations and see whether it’s worth adopting for the long term.

Learning new skills and growing professionally are important to agile testers. They take advantage of the many available free resources to improve their specialized skills, such as exploratory testing. They go to meetings and conferences, join mailing lists, and read articles, blogs, and books to get new ideas. They look for ways to automate (or get help from their coworkers to automate) mundane or repetitive tasks so they have more time to contribute their valuable expertise.

Pierre Veragren, an SQA Lead at iLevel by Weyerhaeuser, identified a quality we often see in agile teams ourselves: “AADD,” Agile Attention Deficit Disorder. Anything not learned quickly might be deemed useless. Agile team members look for return on investment, and if they don’t see it quickly, they move on. This isn’t a negative characteristic when you’re delivering production-ready software every two weeks or even more often.

Retrospectives are a key agile practice that lets the team use yesterday’s experience to do a better job tomorrow. Agile testers use this opportunity to raise testing-related issues and ask the team to brainstorm ways to address them. This is a way for the team to provide feedback to itself for continual improvement.

Lisa’s Story

Our team had used retrospectives to great benefit, but we felt we needed something new to help us focus on doing a better job. I suggested keeping an “impediment backlog” of items that were keeping us from being as productive as we’d like to be. The first thing I wrote in the impediment backlog was our test environment’s slow response time. Our system administrator scrounged a couple of bargain machines and turned them into new, faster servers for our test environments. Our DBA analyzed the test database performance, found that the one-disk system was the impediment, and our manager gave the go-ahead to install a RAID for better disk access. Soon we were able to deploy builds and conduct our exploratory testing much faster.

—Lisa

We’ll talk more about retrospectives and how they can help your team practice continuous improvement in Chapter 19, “Wrap Up the Iteration.”

Respond to Change

When we worked in a waterfall environment, we got used to saying, “Sorry, we can’t make this change now; the requirements are frozen. We’ll have to put that in the first patch release.” It was frustrating for customers because they realized that they didn’t do a great job on defining all their requirements up front.

In a two-week agile iteration, we might have to say, “OK, write a card for that and we’ll do it in the next iteration or next release,” but customers know they can get their change when they want it because they control the priority.