Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams

Technology-facing tests that support the team’s development process are an important foundation for all of the testing that needs to happen. If the team isn’t doing an adequate job with the tests in this quadrant, the other types of testing will be much more difficult. This doesn’t mean you can’t get value from the other quadrants on their own—it just means it will be harder to do so because the team’s code will lack internal quality and everything will take longer.

Technology-facing tests can’t be done without the right tools and infrastructure. In the next section, we look at examples of the types of tools a team needs to be effective with Quadrant 1 tests.

Toolkit

There’s no magical tool that will ensure success. However, tools can help good people do their best work. Building up the right infrastructure to support technology-facing tests is critical. There’s a huge selection of excellent tools available, and they improve all the time. Your team must find the tools that work best for your situation.

Source Code Control

Source code control is known by other names too, such as version control or revision control. It’s certainly not new, or unique to agile development, but no software development team can succeed without it. That’s why we’re discussing it here. Without source code control, you’ll never be sure what you’re testing. Did the programmer change only the module he said he changed, or did he forget changes he made to other modules? You can’t back out unwanted or erroneous changes without some kind of versioning system. Source code control keeps different programmers from walking on each other’s changes to the same modules. Without versioning, you can’t be sure what code to release to production.

Software Configuration Management Patterns: Effective Teamwork, Practical Integrations [2003], by Stephen Berczuk and Brad Appleton, is a good resource to use to learn how and why to use source code control. Source code control is essential to any style of software development.

Use source code control for automated test scripts, too. It’s important to tie the automated tests with the corresponding code version that they tested in case you need to rerun tests against that version in the future. When you label or tag a build, make sure you label or tag the test code too, even if it doesn’t get released to production.

Teams can organize their code hierarchy to provide a repository for production code, corresponding unit tests, and higher-level test scripts. Doing this might require some brainstorming and experimenting in order to get the right structure.

There are many terrific options to choose from. Open source systems such as CVS and Subversion (SVN) are easy to implement, integrate with a continuous build process and IDEs, and are robust. Vendor tools such as IBM Rational ClearCase and Perforce might add features that compensate for the increased overhead they often bring.

Source code control is tightly integrated with development environments. Let’s look at some IDEs used by agile teams.

IDEs

A good IDE (integrated development environment) can be helpful for programmers and testers on an agile team. The IDE integrates with the source code control system to help prevent problems with versioning and changes walking on each other. The editors inside an IDE are specific to the programming language and flag errors even as you write the code. Most importantly, IDEs provide support for refactoring.

Programmers who use an IDE tend to have strong personal preferences. However, sometimes an organization decrees that all programmers must use a specific IDE. This might be because of licensing, or it might be intended to encourage open pair programming. It is easier to pair with another programmer if the other person uses the same IDE, but it’s generally not essential for the same one to be used. Most tools work similarly, so it’s not hard to change from one IDE to another in order to meet new needs or take advantage of new features. Some diehards still prefer to use tried-and-true technology such as vi, vim, or emacs with make files rather than an IDE.

Open source IDEs such as Eclipse and NetBeans are widely used by agile teams, along with proprietary systems such as Visual Studio and IntelliJ IDEA. IDEs have plug-ins to support different languages and tools. They work as well with test scripts as they do with production code.

Lisa’s Story

On my current team, some programmers were using IntelliJ IDEA, while others used Eclipse. Environmental differences in rare cases caused issues, such as tests passing in the IDE but not the full build, or check-ins via the IDE causing havoc in the source code control system. Generally, though, use of different IDEs caused no problems. Interestingly, over time most of the Eclipse users switched. Pairing with the IntelliJ users led them to prefer it.