Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams

We were early adopters of Extreme Programming (XP), testing on XP teams that weren’t at all sure where testers or their brand of testing fit in. At the time, there wasn’t much in the agile (which wasn’t called agile yet) literature about acceptance testing, or how professional testers might contribute. We learned not only from our own experiences but from others in the small agile community. In 2002, Lisa co-wrote Testing Extreme Programming with Tip House, with lots of help from Janet. Since then, agile development has evolved, and the agile testing community has flourished. With so many people contributing ideas, we’ve learned a whole lot more about agile testing.

Individually and together, we’ve helped teams transition to agile, helped testers learn how to contribute on agile teams, and worked with others in the agile community to explore ways that agile teams can be more successful at testing. Our experiences differ. Lisa has spent most of her time as an agile tester on stable teams working for years at a time on web applications in the retail, telephony, and financial industries. Janet has worked with software organizations developing enterprise systems in a variety of industries. These agile projects have included developing a message-handling system, an environmental-tracking system, a remote data management system (including an embedded application, with a communication network as well as the application), an oil and gas production accounting application, and applications in the airline transportation industry. She has played different roles—sometimes tester, sometimes coach—but has always worked to better integrate the testers with the rest of the team. She has been with teams from as little as six months to as long as one-and-a-half years.

With these different points of view, we have learned to work together and complement each other’s skill sets, and we have given many presentations and tutorials together.

Why We Wrote This Book

Several excellent books oriented toward agile development on testing and test patterns have been published (see our Bibliography). These books are generally focused on helping the developer. We decided to write a book aimed at helping agile teams be more successful at delivering business value using tests that the business can understand. We want to help testers and quality assurance (QA) professionals who have worked in more traditional development methodologies make the transition to agile development.

We’ve figured out how to apply—on a practical, day-to-day level—the fruits of our own experience working with teams of all sizes and a variety of ideas from other agile practitioners. We’ve put all this together in this book to help testers, quality assurance managers, developers, development managers, product owners, and anyone else with a stake in effective testing on agile projects to deliver the software their customers need. However, we’ve focused on the role of the tester, a role that may be adopted by a variety of professionals.

Agile testing practices aren’t limited to members of agile teams. They can be used to improve testing on projects using traditional development methodologies as well. This book is also intended to help testers working on projects using any type of development methodology.

Agile development isn’t the only way to successfully deliver software. However, all of the successful teams we’ve been on, agile or waterfall, have had several critical commonalities. The programmers write and automate unit and integration tests that provide good code coverage. They are disciplined in the use of source code control and code integration. Skilled testers are involved from the start of the development cycle and are given time and resources to do an adequate job of all necessary forms of testing. An automated regression suite that covers the system functionality at a higher level is run and checked regularly. The development team understands the customers’ jobs and their needs, and works closely together with the business experts.

People, not methodologies or tools, make projects successful. We enjoy agile development because its values, principles, and core practices enable people to do their best work, and testing and quality are central to agile development. In this book, we explain how to apply agile values and principles to your unique testing situation and enable your teams to succeed. We have more about that in Chapter 1, “What Is Agile Testing, Anyway?” and in Chapter 2, “Ten Principles for Agile Testers.”

How We Wrote This Book

Having experienced the benefits of agile development, we used agile practices to produce this book. As we began work on the book, we talked to agile testers and teams from around the globe to find out what problems they encountered and how they addressed them. We planned how we would cover these areas in the book.