Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams

If this is your situation, your team is at risk. Hidden assumptions are likely to go undetected until late in the release cycle. Ripple effects of a story on other parts of the system aren’t identified until it’s too late. The team isn’t making the best use of every team member’s skills, so it’s not going to be able to produce the best possible software. Communication might break down, and it’ll be hard to keep up with what the programmers and customers are doing. The team risks being divided in an unhealthy way between developers and testers, and there’s more potential that the development team will become isolated from the customer team.

How can you avoid this peril? See if you can arrange to be located near the developers. If you can’t, at least come to their area to talk and pair test. Ask them to show you what they’re working on. Ask them to look at the test cases you’ve written. Invite yourself to meetings if nobody else has invited you. Make yourself useful by testing and providing feedback, and become a necessity to the team.

Help customers develop their stories and acceptance tests. Push the “whole team” attitude, and ask the team to work on testing problems. If your team is having trouble adapting to agile development, suggest experimenting with some new ideas for an iteration or two. Propose adopting the “Power of Three” rule to promote good communication. Use the information in this book to show that testers can help agile teams succeed beyond their wildest expectations.

During story estimating and planning sessions, agile testers look at each feature from multiple perspectives: business, end user, production support, and programmer. They consider the problems faced by the business and how the software might address them. They raise questions that flush out assumptions made by the customer and developer teams. At the start of each iteration, they help to make sure the customer provides clear requirements and examples, and they help the development team turn those into tests. The tests drive development, and test results provide feedback on the team’s progress. Testers help to raise issues so that no testing is overlooked; it’s more than functional testing. Customers don’t always know that they should mention their performance and reliability needs or security concerns, but testers think to ask about those. Testers also keep the testing approach and tools as simple and lightweight as possible. By the end of the iteration, testers verify that the minimum testing was completed.

Lines between roles on an agile team are blurred. Other team members might be skilled at the same activities that testers perform. For example, analysts and programmers also write business-facing tests. As long as all testing activities are performed, an agile team doesn’t necessarily require members who identify themselves primarily as testers. However, we have found that teams benefit from the skills that professional testers have developed. The agile principles and values we’ve discussed will help any team do a good job of testing and delivering value.

Summary

In this chapter, we covered principles for agile testers and the values we think an agile tester needs to possess in order to contribute effectively to an agile team.

An “agile testing mind-set” is customer-focused, results-oriented, craftsman-like, collaborative, creative, eager to learn, and passionate about delivering business value in a timely manner.

Attitude is important, and it blurs the lines between testers, programmers, and other roles on an agile team.

Agile testers apply agile values and principles such as feedback, communication, courage, simplicity, enjoyment, and delivering value in order to help the team identify and deliver the customer requirements for each story.

Agile testers add value to their teams and their organizations with their unique viewpoint and team-oriented approach.

Part II Organizational Challenges

When software development organizations implement agile development, the testing or QA team often takes the longest to make the transition. Independent QA teams have become entrenched in many organizations. When they start to adapt to a new agile organization, they encounter cultural differences that are difficult for them to accept. In Part II, we talk about introducing change and some of the barriers you might encounter when transitioning to agile. Training is a big part of what organizations making the transition need, and it’s often forgotten. It’s also hard to see how existing processes such as audits and process improvement frameworks will work in the agile environment. Going from an independent QA team to an integrated agile team is a huge change.

Chapter 4, “Team Logistics,” talks about the team structure, such as where a tester actually fits into the team, and the never-ending question about tester-developer ratio. We’ll also talk about hiring testers and what to look for in a successful agile tester.