Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams

Some practices don’t work well in isolation. Refactoring is impossible without automated tests. It’s possible to do small releases in a mini-waterfall fashion and avoid all benefits of agile development. If your on-site customer isn’t empowered to make decisions, her value to the team is limited.

Agile practices were designed to complement each other. Take time to understand the purpose of each one, consider what is needed to take full advantage of each practice, and make thoughtful decisions about what works for your team.

Success Factor 6: Collaborate with Customers

Some of the greatest value that testers contribute to agile teams is helping customers clarify and prioritize requirements, illustrating the requirements with concrete examples of desired behavior and user scenarios, and turning those examples into executable tests. Testers speak the domain language of the business and the technical language of the development team. We make good facilitators and translators.

Never get in the way of direct communication between programmers and customers. Do encourage as much direct communication as possible. Use the “Power of Three.” When requirements are missed or misunderstood, a customer, programmer, and tester need to work together to get questions answered. Get the customers talking in front of a whiteboard or its virtual equivalent as often as necessary. If customers are scattered around the campus, the country, or the globe, use every tool you can find to enhance communication and collaboration. Teleconferences, instant messages, and wikis aren’t an ideal replacement for face-to-face conversation, but they beat sending emails or not talking at all.

Success Factor 7: Look at the Big Picture

This is a generalization, of course, but we’ve found that testers tend to look at the big picture, and usually from a customer point of view. Programmers usually have to focus on delivering the story they’re working on now, and while they may be using tests to guide them, they have to focus on the technical implementation of the requirements.

This big-picture viewpoint is a huge contribution to the team. Test-driven development, done well, delivers solid code that may, in isolation, be free of defects. What if that new feature causes some apparently unrelated part of the application to break? Someone has to consider the impact to the larger system and bring that to the team’s attention. What if we’ve overlooked some little detail that will irritate the customers? The new UI may be flawlessly coded, but if the background color makes the text hard to read, that’s what the end user’s going to notice.

Use the Agile Testing Quadrants as a guide to help you plan testing that will cover all the angles. Use the test pyramid idea to ensure good ROI from your test automation. Guiding development with tests helps make sure you don’t miss something big, but it’s not perfect. Use exploratory testing to learn more about how the application should work, and what direction your testing needs to take. Make your test environments as similar as possible to production, using data that reflects the real world. Be diligent about re-creating a production-style situation for activities such as load testing.

Part III explains how to use the Agile Testing Quadrants.

It’s easy for everyone on the team to narrowly focus only on the task or story at hand. That’s a drawback of working on small chunks of functionality at a time. Help your team take a step back now and then to evaluate how your current stories fit into the grand scheme of the business. Keep asking yourselves how you can do a better job of delivering real value.

Summary

Testing and quality are the responsibility of the whole team, but testers bring a special viewpoint and unique skills. As a tester, your passion for delivering a product that delights your customers will carry you through the frustrations you and your team may encounter. Don’t be afraid to be an agent for continual improvement. Let agile principles and values guide you as you work with the customer and development teams, adding value throughout each iteration.

In this concluding chapter, we looked at seven key factors for successful agile testing:

1. Use the whole-team approach.

2. Adopt an agile testing mind-set.

3. Automate regression testing.

4. Provide and obtain feedback.

5. Build a foundation of core practices.

6. Collaborate with customers.

7. Look at the big picture.

Glossary

This glossary contains the authors’ definitions of terms used throughout this book.

Acceptance Test