Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams

Your strategy for selecting the tools you need should be based on your team’s skill set, the technology your application uses, your team’s automation priorities, time and budget constraints, and other concerns unique to your situation. Your selection of a tool or tools should not be based on the latest and coolest tool offered by a salesman. You might need many different tools to solve different problems.

For more information about a general approach to test automation, see Chapter 14, “An Agile Test Automation Strategy.”

We encourage customers to do some advance preparation and to be ready to explain examples for each story during iteration planning. Testers are in a good position to help customers figure out how to provide the right amount of detail at the beginning of the iteration. It’s hard to strike just the right balance.

Lisa’s Story

Soon after our team chose to use FitNesse for specifying and automating business-facing tests, our product owner and I tried to make good use of the new tool. We had an extremely complex epic coming up. We spent many hours writing detailed test cases for highly complex business rules weeks in advance of the iteration where the first story of the epic was started. We felt good about getting a running start on developing the new functionality.

When they started working on these stories, the programmers complained that they couldn’t get the big picture from these detailed tests. The tests were also designed in a way that was incompatible with the actual code design. I ended up spending hours refactoring them. It wasn’t a complete waste of time, because at least I understood the stories well and we had a number of test cases we could use eventually, but it wasn’t the right approach for our team. Trial and error has shown us that high-level tests combined with a few examples of desired and undesired behavior are the best way for the programmers to know what to start coding.

—Lisa

Experiment with different levels of up-front detail in test cases to figure out what works best for your team. Whatever level of detail you’re after, you need some way to help customers find and express examples of desired system behavior. In the next section, we look at the types of tools that can do that.

Tools to Elicit Examples and Requirements

As we pointed out in Chapter 8, stories are only a starting place for a prolonged conversation about the desired behavior. Having correctly sized stories where the feature, user, and purpose are clearly stated gives us a head start. They aren’t very detailed, because as Mike Cohn [2004] points out, it’s best to defer collecting details until the story is included in an iteration. Collecting details for a story that might never be included is a waste of resources. We like the “role, function, business value” pattern for user stories that Mike Cohn describes in User Stories Applied, as in:

As a (role), I want (function) so that (business value).

This format doesn’t work for everyone, so we encourage you to experiment and see what works best in your situation. Regardless of how your user stories read, you need some way to flesh those stories out with examples and business-facing tests that guide development.

One simple story can have a wide-ranging impact, not only on the application, but across the organization, its clients, its associates, vendors, or partners. If we change an API, we have to notify any customers or vendors who might be using it. If we plan a UI change, we want, or might even be contractually obligated, to give a certain amount of advance notice to users. Stories may affect legal concerns or impact external reporting. New features often mean new or updated documentation. Of course, changed functionality is likely to affect other parts of the system.

The software development team, including the testers, should help the customer capture and communicate all of the requirements related to each story or theme. Developing new features, only to be prevented from releasing them for legal reasons or because a business partner wasn’t informed in time, is a frustrating waste of time (just ask Lisa!). Lean development teaches us to avoid waste while we develop software.

What tools can help us illustrate desired behavior with examples, brainstorm potential implementations and ripple effects, and create requirements we can turn into tests? Some examples are:

Checklists

Mind Maps

Spreadsheets

Mock-Ups

Flow Diagrams

Software-Based Tools

The list includes a number of simple tools that aren’t unique to agile testing but that shouldn’t be neglected. In agile development, simple solutions are usually best. Let’s look at these in more detail.

Checklists