Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams

A tester provides information to stakeholders about the software being developed. A tester helps customers define functional and nonfunctional requirements and quality criteria, and helps turn these into tests that guide development and verify desired behavior. Testers perform a wide variety of activities related to delivering high-quality software, such as test automation and exploratory testing. In agile development, everyone on the development team performs testing activities. Team members who identify themselves as testers work closely with other members of both the developer and customer teams.

Theme

A theme is the same as an epic or feature. It is a piece of functionality described by the customer and placed in the product backlog to be broken up into stories that are sized and estimated.

Unit Test

A unit test verifies the behavior of a small part of the overall system. It may be as small as a single object or method that is a consequence of one or more design decisions.

Velocity

A development team’s velocity is the amount of value it delivers in each iteration, measured in story points, ideal days, or hours. Generally, only completed stories are included in the velocity. Velocity is helpful to the business in planning for future features and releases. Agile teams use their velocity for the previous iteration to help determine the amount of work they can take on in the next iteration.

Web Service Description Language (WSDL)

Web Service Description Language (WDSL) is an XML format for describing network services as a set of endpoints operating on messages containing either document-oriented or procedure-oriented information.

Bibliography

Books, Articles, Papers, and Blog Postings

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Alles, Micah, David Crosby, Carl Erickson, Brian Harleton, Michael Marsiglia, Greg Pattison, and Curt Stienstra. “Presenter First: Organizing Complex GUI Applications for Test-Driven Development,” Agile 2006, Minneapolis, MN, July 2006.

Ambler, Scott. Agile Database Techniques: Effective Strategies for the Agile Software Developer, Wiley, 2003.

Astels, David. Test-Driven Development: A Practical Guide, Prentice Hall, 2003.

Bach, James. “Exploratory Testing Explained,” www.satisfice.com/articles/et-article.pdf, 2003.

Bach, Jonathan. “Session-Based Test Management,” Software Testing and Quality Engineering Magazine, November, 2000, www.satisfice.com/articles/sbtm.pdf.

Beck, Kent. Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change, Addison-Wesley, 2000.

Beck, Kent, and Andres, Cynthia. Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change. 2nd Edition, Addison-Wesley, 2004.

Berczuk, Stephen and Brad Appleton. Software Configuration Management Patterns: Effective Teamwork, Practical Integration, Addison-Wesley, 2003.

Bolton, Michael. “Testing Without a Map,” Better Software, January 2005, www.developsense.com/articles/Testing%20Without%20A%20Map.pdf.

Bos, Erik and Christ Vriens. “An Agile CMM,” in Extreme Programming and Agile Methods–XP/Agile Universe 2004, 4th Conference on Extreme Programming and Agile Methods, Calgary, Canada, August 15–18, 2004, Proceedings, ed. Carmen Zannier, Hakan Erdogmus, Lowell Lindstrom, pp. 129–138, Springer, 2004.

Boutelle, Jonathan. “Usability Testing for Agile Development,” www.jonathanboutelle.com/mt/archives/2005/08/usability_testi_1.html, 2005.

Brown, Titus. “The (Lack of) Testing Death Spiral,” http://ivory.idyll.org/blog/mar-08/software-quality-death-spiral.html, 2008.

Buwalda, Hans. “Soap Opera Testing,” Better Software Magazine, February 2004, www.logigear.com/resources/articles_lg/soap_opera_testing.asp.

Clark, Mike. Pragmatic Project Automation: How to Build, Deploy and Monitor Java Apps, The Pragmatic Programmers, 2004.

Cohn, Mike. User Stories Applied for Agile Software Development, Addison-Wesley, 2004.

Cohn, Mike. Agile Estimating and Planning, Prentice Hall, 2005.

Crispin, Lisa and Tip House. Testing Extreme Programming, Addison-Wesley 2002.

Crispin, Lisa. Articles “Hiring an Agile Tester,” “An Agile Tool Selection Strategy for Web Testing Tools,” “Driving Software Quality: How Test-Driven Development Impacts Software Quality,” http://lisa.crispin.home.att.net.

DeMarco, Tom and Timothy Lister. Managing Risk on Software Projects, Dorset House, 2003.