Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams

Teams that fail to implement the core practices related to agile development are likely to struggle.

Legacy systems usually present the biggest obstacles to test-driven development, but these problems can be overcome with incremental approaches.

If your team doesn’t now do these tests, you can help them get started by engaging other team members and getting support from management.

There can be some overlap between technology-facing tests and business-facing tests that support the team. However, when faced with a choice, push tests to the lowest level in order to maximize ROI.

Teams should set up continuous integration, build, and test processes in order to provide feedback as quickly as possible.

Agile teams require tools for tasks such as source code control, test automation, IDEs, and build management in order to facilitate technology-facing tests that support the team.

Chapter 8 Business-Facing Tests that Support the Team

In the last chapter, we talked about programmer tests, those low-level tests that help programmers make sure they have written the code right. How do they know the right thing to build? In phased and gated methodologies, we try to solve that by gathering requirements up front and putting as much detail in them as possible. In projects using agile practices, we put all our faith in story cards and tests that customers understand in order to help code the right thing. These “understandable” tests are the subject of this chapter.

Driving Development with Business-Facing Tests

Yikes, we’re starting an iteration with no more information than what fits on an index card, something like what’s shown in Figure 8-1.

Figure 8-1 Story to set up conversation

That’s not much information, and it’s not meant to be. Stories are a brief description of desired functionality and an aid to planning and prioritizing work. On a traditional waterfall project, the development team might be given a wordy requirements document that includes every detail of the feature set. On an agile project, the customer team and development team strike up a conversation based on the story. The team needs requirements of some kind, and they need them at a level that will let them start writing working code almost immediately. To do this, we need examples to turn into tests that will confirm what the customer really wants.

These business-facing tests address business requirements. These tests help provide the big picture and enough details to guide coding. Business-facing tests express requirements based on examples and use a language and format that both the customer and development teams can understand. Examples form the basis of learning the desired behavior of each feature, and we use those examples as the basis for our story tests in Quadrants 2 (see Figure 8-2).

Figure 8-2 The Agile Testing Quadrants, highlighting Quadrant 2

Business-facing tests are also called “customer-facing,” “story,” “customer,” and “acceptance” tests. The term “acceptance test” is particularly confusing, because it makes some people think only of “user acceptance tests.” In the context of agile development, acceptance tests generally refer to the business-facing tests, but the term could also include the technology-facing tests from Quadrant 4, such as the customer’s criteria for system performance or security. In this chapter, we’re discussing only the business-facing tests that support the team by guiding development and providing quick feedback.

As we explained in the previous two chapters, the order in which we present these four quadrants isn’t related to the order in which we might perform activities from each quadrant. The business-facing tests in Quadrant 2 are written for each story before coding is started, because they help the team understand what code to write. Like the tests in Quadrant 1, these tests drive development, but at a higher level. Quadrant 1 activities ensure internal quality, maximize team productivity, and minimize technical debt. Quadrant 2 tests define and verify external quality, and help us know when we’re done.

Part V, “An Iteration in the Life,” examines the order in which we perform tests from the different quadrants.