Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams / Edition 1|eBook

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780321616937
Publisher:	Pearson Education
Publication date:	12/30/2008
Series:	Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Cohn)
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	576
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Lisa Crispin is dedicated to helping agile teams and testers discover good ways to deliver the best possible product. She specializes in showing testers and agile teams how testers can add value and how to guide development with business-facing tests. Since 2003, she’s been a tester on a Scrum/XP team at ePlan Services, Inc., and frequently leads tutorials and workshops on agile testing at conferences. Lisa regularly contributes articles about agile testing to publications such as Better Software magazine, I EEE Software, and Methods and Tools. Lisa also coauthored Testing Extreme Programming (Addison-Wesley, 2002) with Tip House.

Janet Gregory is the founder of DragonFire, Inc., an agile quality process consultancy and training firm. Her passion is helping teams build quality systems. Since 1998, she has worked as a coach and tester introducing agile practices into both large and small companies. Her focus is working with business users and testers to understand their role in agile projects. Janet is a frequent speaker at agile and testing software conferences, and she is a major contributor to the North American agile testing community.

Read an Excerpt

Preface

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 betterintegrate 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.

We made a release plan based on two-week iterations. Every two weeks, we delivered two rough-draft chapters to our book website. Because we aren’t co-located, we found tools to use to communicate, provide “source code control” for our chapters, deliver the product to our customers, and get their feedback. We couldn’t “pair” much real-time, but we traded chapters back and forth for review and revision, and had informal “stand-ups” daily via instant message.

Our “customers” were the generous people in the agile community who volunteered to review draft chapters. They provided feedback by email or (if we were lucky) in person. We used the feedback to guide us as we continued writing and revising. After all the rough drafts were done, we made a new plan to complete the revisions, incorporating all the helpful ideas from our “customers.”

Our most important tool was mind maps. We started out by creating a mind map of how we envisioned the whole book. We then created mind maps for each section of the book. Before writing each chapter, we brainstormed with a mind map. As we revised, we revisited the mind maps, which helped us think of ideas we may have missed.

Because we think the mind maps added so much value, we’ve included the mind map as part of the opening of each chapter. We hope they’ll help you get an overview of all the information included in the chapter, and inspire you to try using mind maps yourself.Our Audience

This book will help you if you’ve ever asked any of the following excellent questions, which we’ve heard many times:

If developers are writing tests, what do the testers do?
I’m a QA manager, and our company is implementing agile development (Scrum, XP, DSDM, name your flavor). What’s my role now?
I’ve worked as a tester on a traditional waterfall team, and I’m really excited by what I’ve read about agile. What do I need to know to work on an agile team?
What’s an “agile tester”?
I’m a developer on an agile team. We’re writing code test-first, but our customers still aren’t happy with what we deliver. What are we missing?
I’m a developer on an agile team. We’re writing our code test-first. We make sure we have tests for all our code. Why do we need testers?
I coach an agile development team. Our QA team can’t keep up with us, and testing always lags behind. Should we just plan to test an iteration behind development?
I’m a software development manager. We recently transitioned to agile, but all our testers quit. Why?
I’m a tester on a team that’s going agile. I don’t have any programming or automation skills. Is there any place for me on an agile team?
How can testing possibly keep up with two-week iterations?
What about load testing, performance testing, usability testing, all the other “ilities”? Where do these fit in?
We have audit requirements. How does agile development and testing address these?

If you have similar questions and you’re looking for practical advice about how testers contribute to agile teams and how agile teams can do an effective job of testing, you’ve picked up the right book.

There are many “flavors” of agile development, but they all have much in common. We support the Agile Manifesto, which we explain in Chapter 1, “What Is Agile Testing, Anyway?” Whether you’re practicing Scrum, Extreme Programming, Crystal, DSDM, or your own variation of agile development, you’ll find information here to help with your testing efforts.

A User Story for an Agile Testing Book When Robin Dymond, a managing consultant and trainer who has helped many teams adopt lean and agile, heard we were writing this book, he sent us the user story he’d like to have fulfilled. It encapsulates many of the requirements we planned to deliver.
Book Story 1
As a QA professional, I can understand the main difference between traditional QA professionals and agile team members with a QA background, so that I can begin internalizing my new responsibilites and deliver value to the customer sooner and with less difficulty
Acceptance conditions:

My concerns and fears about losing control of testing are addressed.
My concerns and fears about having to write code (never done it) are addressed.
As a tester I understand my new value to the team.
As a tester new to Agile, I can easily read about things that are most important to my new role.
As a tester new to Agile, I can easily ignore things that are less important to my new role.
As a tester new to Agile, I can easily get further detail about agile testing that is important to MY context.
Were I to suggest a solution to this problem, I think of Scrum versus XP. With Scrum you get a simple view that enables people to quickly adopt Agile. However, Scrum is the tip of the iceberg for successful agile teams. For testers who are new, I would love to see agile testing ideas expressed in layers of detail. What do I need to know today, what should I know tomorrow, and what context-sensitive things should I consider for continuous improvement?
We’ve tried to provide these layers of detail in this book. We’ll approach agile testing from a few different perspectives: transitioning into agile development, using an agile testing matrix to guide testing efforts, and explaining all the different testing activities that take place throughout the agile development cycle.

How to Use This Book

If you aren’t sure where to start in this book, or you just want a quick overview, we suggest you read the last chapter, Chapter 22, “Key Success Factors,” and follow wherever it leads you. Part I: Introduction

If you want quick answers to questions such as “Is agile testing different than testing on waterfall projects?” or “What’s the difference between a tester on a traditional team and an agile tester?,” start with Part I, which includes the following chapters:

Chapter 1: What Is Agile Testing, Anyway?
Chapter 2: Ten Principles for Agile Testers

These chapters are the “tip of the iceberg” that Robin requested in his user story. They include an overview of how agile differs from a traditional phased approach and explore the “whole team” approach to quality and testing.

In this part of the book we define the “agile testing mind-set” and what makes testers successful on agile teams. We explain how testers apply agile values and principles to contribute their particular expertise. Part II: Organizational Challenges

If you’re a tester or manager on a traditional QA team, or you’re coaching a team that’s moving to agile, Part II will help you with the organizational challenges faced by teams in transition. The “whole team” attitude represents a lot of cultural changes to team members, but it helps overcome the fear testers have when they wonder how much control they’ll have or whether they’ll be expected to write code.

Some of the questions answered in Part II are:

How can we engage the QA team?
What about management’s expectations?
How should we structure our agile team, and where do the testers fit?
What do we look for when hiring an agile tester?
How do we cope with a team distributed across the globe?

Part II also introduces some topics we don’t always enjoy talking about. We explore ideas about how to transition processes and models, such as audits or SOX compliance, that are common in traditional environments.

Metrics and how they’re applied can be a controversial issue, but there are positive ways to use them to benefit the team. Defect tracking easily becomes a point of contention for teams, with questions such as “Do we use a defect-tracking system?” or “When do we log bugs?”

Two common questions about agile testing from people with traditional test team experience are “What about test plans?” and “Is it true there’s no documentation on agile projects?” Part II clears up these mysteries.

The chapters in Part II are as follows:

Chapter 3: Cultural Challenges
Chapter 4: Team Logistics
Chapter 5: Transitioning Typical Processes

Part III: The Agile Testing Quadrants

Do you want more details on what types of testing are done on agile projects? Are you wondering who does what testing? How do you know whether you’ve done all the testing that’s needed? How do you decide what practices, techniques, and tools fit your particular situation? If these are your concerns, check out Part III.

We use Brian Marick’s Agile Testing Quadrants to explain the purpose of testing. The quadrants help you define all the different areas your testing should address, from unit level tests to reliability and other “ilities,” and everything in between. This is where we get down into the nitty-gritty of how to deliver a high-quality product. We explain techniques that can help you to communicate well with your customers and better understand their requirements. This part of the book shows how tests drive development at multiple levels. It also provides tools for your toolkit that can help you to effectively define, design, and execute tests that support the team and critique the product. The chapters include the following:

Chapter 6: The Purpose of Testing
Chapter 7: Technology-Facing Tests that Support the Team

Chapter 8: Business-Facing Tests that Support the Team
Chapter 9: Toolkit for Business-Facing Tests that Support the Team
Chapter 10: Business-Facing Tests that Critique the Product
Chapter 11: Critiquing the Product Using Technology-Facing Tests
Chapter 12: Summary of Testing Quadrants

Part IV: Automation

Test automation is a central focus of successful agile teams, and it’s a scary topic for lots of people (we know, because it’s had us running scared before!). How do you squeeze test automation into short iterations and still get all the stories completed?

Part IV gets into the details of when and why to automate, how to overcome barriers to test automation, and how to develop and implement a test automation strategy that works for your team. Because test automation tools change and evolve so rapidly, our aim is not to explain how to use specific tools, but to help you select and use the right tools for your situation. Our agile test automation tips will help you with difficult challenges such as testing legacy code.

The chapters are as follows:

Chapter 13: Why We Want to Automate Tests and What Holds Us Back
Chapter 14: An Agile Test Automation Strategy

Part V: An Iteration in the Life of a Tester

If you just want to get a feel for what testers do throughout the agile development cycle, or you need help putting together all the information in this book, go to Part V. Here we chronicle an iteration, and more, in the life of an agile tester. Testers contribute enormous value throughout the agile software development cycles. In Part V, we explain the activities that testers do on a daily basis. We start with planning releases and iterations to get each iteration off to a good start, and move through the iteration—collaborating with the customer and development teams, testing, and writing code. We end the iteration by delivering new features and finding ways for the team to improve the process.

The chapters break down this way:

Chapter 15: Tester Activities in Release or Theme Planning
Chapter 16: Hit the Ground Running
Chapter 17: Iteration Kickoff
Chapter 18: Coding and Testing
Chapter 19: Wrap Up the Iteration
Chapter 20: Successful Delivery

Part VI: Summary

In Chapter 21, “Key Success Factors,” we present seven key factors agile teams can use for successful testing. If you’re having trouble deciding where to start with agile testing, or how to work on improving what you’re doing now, these success factors will give you some direction.Other Elements

We’ve also included a glossary we hope you will find useful, as well as references to books, articles, websites, and blogs in the bibliography.Just Start Doing It—Today!

Agile development is all about doing your best work. Every team has unique challenges. We’ve tried to present all the information that we think may help agile testers, their teams, managers, and customers. Apply the techniques that you think are appropriate for your situation. Experiment constantly, evaluate the results, and come back to this book to see what might help you improve. Our goal is to help testers and agile teams enjoy delivering the best and most valuable product they can.

When we asked Dierk König, founder and project manager of Canoo WebTest, what he thought was the number one success factor for agile testing, he answered: “Start doing it—today!” You can take a baby step to improve your team’s testing right now. Go get started!

Foreword by Mike Cohn      xxiii
Foreword by Brian Marick      xxv
Preface      xxvii
Acknowledgments      xxxvii
About the Authors      xli

Part I: Introduction      1
Chapter 1: What Is Agile Testing, Anyway?      3
Agile Values 3
What Do We Mean by “Agile Testing”? 4
A Little Context for Roles and Activities on an Agile Team 7
How Is Agile Testing Different? 9
Whole-Team Approach 15
Summary 17

Chapter 2: Ten Principles for Agile Testers      19
What’s an Agile Tester? 19
The Agile Testing Mind-Set 20
Applying Agile Principles and Values 21
Adding Value 31
Summary 33

Part II: Organizational Challenges      35
Chapter 3: Cultural Challenges      37
Organizational Culture 37
Barriers to Successful Agile Adoption by Test/QA Teams 44
Introducing Change 49
Management Expectations 52
Change Doesn’t Come Easy 56
Summary 58

Chapter 4: Team Logistics      59
Team Structure 59
Physical Logistics 65
Resources 66
Building a Team 69
Summary 71

Chapter 5: Transitioning Typical Processes      73
Seeking Lightweight Processes 73
Metrics 74
Defect Tracking 79
Test Planning 86
Existing Processes and Models 88
Summary 93

Part III: The Agile Testing Quadrants      95
Chapter 6: The Purpose of Testing      97
The Agile Testing Quadrants 97
Knowing When a Story Is Done 104
Managing Technical Debt 106
Testing in Context 106
Summary 108

Chapter 7: Technology-Facing Tests that Support the Team       109
An Agile Testing Foundation 109
Why Write and Execute These Tests? 112
Where Do Technology-Facing Tests Stop? 119
What If the Team Doesn’t Do These Tests? 121
Toolkit 123
Summary 127

Chapter 8: Business-Facing Tests that Support the Team      129
Driving Development with Business-Facing Tests 129
The Requirements Quandary 132
Thin Slices, Small Chunks 144
How Do We Know We’re Done? 146
Tests Mitigate Risk 147
Testability and Automation 149
Summary 150

Chapter 9: Toolkit for Business-Facing Tests that Support the Team       153
Business-Facing Test Tool Strategy 153
Tools to Elicit Examples and Requirements 155
Tools for Automating Tests Based on Examples 164
Strategies for Writing Tests 177
Testability 183
Test Management 186
Summary 186

Chapter 10: Business-Facing Tests that Critique the Product      189
Introduction to Quadrant 3 190
Demonstrations 191
Scenario Testing 192
Exploratory Testing 195
Usability Testing 202
Behind the GUI 204
Testing Documents and Documentation 207
Tools to Assist with Exploratory Testing 210
Summary 214

Chapter 11: Critiquing the Product Using Technology-Facing Tests       217
Introduction to Quadrant 4 217
Who Does It? 220
When Do You Do It? 222
“ility” Testing 223
Performance, Load, Stress, and Scalability Testing 233
Summary 238

Chapter 12: Summary of Testing Quadrants      241
Review of the Testing Quadrants 241
A System Test Example 242
Tests Driving Development 244
Automation 245
Critiquing the Product with Business-Facing Tests 248
Documentation 251
Using the Agile Testing Quadrants 252
Summary 253

Part IV: Automation      255
Chapter 13: Why We Want to Automate Tests and What Holds Us Back      257
Why Automate? 258
Barriers to Automation–Things that Get in the Way 264
Can We Overcome These Barriers? 270
Summary 271

Chapter 14: An Agile Test Automation Strategy        273
An Agile Approach to Test Automation 274
What Can We Automate? 279
What Shouldn’t We Automate? 285
What Might Be Hard to Automate? 287
Developing an Automation Strategy–Where Do We Start? 288
Applying Agile Principles to Test Automation 298
Supplying Data for Tests 304
Evaluating Automation Tools 311
Implementing Automation 316
Managing Automated Tests 319
Go Get Started 324
Summary 324

Part V: An Iteration in the Life of a Tester      327
Chapter 15: Tester Activities in Release or Theme Planning      329
The Purpose of Release Planning 330
Sizing 332
Prioritizing 338
What’s in Scope? 340
Test Planning 345
Test Plan Alternatives 350
Preparing for Visibility 354
Summary 366

Chapter 16: Hit the Ground Running       369
Be Proactive 369
Advance Clarity 373
Examples 378
Test Strategies 380
Prioritize Defects 381
Resources 381
Summary 382

Chapter 17: Iteration Kickoff      383
Iteration Planning 383
Testable Stories 393
Collaborate with Customers 396
High-Level Tests and Examples 397
Summary 403

Chapter 18: Coding and Testing      405
Driving Development 406
Tests that Critique the Product 412
Collaborate with Programmers 413
Talk to Customers 414
Completing Testing Tasks 415
Dealing with Bugs 416
It’s All about Choices 419
Facilitate Communication 429
Regression Tests 432
Resources 434
Iteration Metrics 435
Summary 440

Chapter 19: Wrap Up the Iteration       443
Iteration Demo 443
Retrospectives 444
Celebrate Successes 449
Summary 451

Chapter 20: Successful Delivery       453
What Makes a Product? 453
Planning Enough Time for Testing 455
The End Game 456
Customer Testing 464
Post-Development Testing Cycles 467
Deliverables 468
Releasing the Product 470
Customer Expectations 475
Summary 476

Part VI: Summary      479
Chapter 21: Key Success Factors       481
Success Factor 1: Use the Whole-Team Approach 482
Success Factor 2: Adopt an Agile Testing Mind-Set 482
Success Factor 3: Automate Regression Testing 484
Success Factor 4: Provide and Obtain Feedback 484
Success Factor 5: Build a Foundation of Core Practices 486
Success Factor 6: Collaborate with Customers 489
Success Factor 7: Look at the Big Picture 490
Summary 491

Glossary      493
Bibliography      501
Index      509

Preface

Preface Preface

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.

We made a release plan based on two-week iterations. Every two weeks, we delivered two rough-draft chapters to our book website. Because we aren’t co-located, we found tools to use to communicate, provide “source code control” for our chapters, deliver the product to our customers, and get their feedback. We couldn’t “pair” much real-time, but we traded chapters back and forth for review and revision, and had informal “stand-ups” daily via instant message.

Our “customers” were the generous people in the agile community who volunteered to review draft chapters. They provided feedback by email or (if we were lucky) in person. We used the feedback to guide us as we continued writing and revising. After all the rough drafts were done, we made a new plan to complete the revisions, incorporating all the helpful ideas from our “customers.”

Our most important tool was mind maps. We started out by creating a mind map of how we envisioned the whole book. We then created mind maps for each section of the book. Before writing each chapter, we brainstormed with a mind map. As we revised, we revisited the mind maps, which helped us think of ideas we may have missed.

Because we think the mind maps added so much value, we’ve included the mind map as part of the opening of each chapter. We hope they’ll help you get an overview of all the information included in the chapter, and inspire you to try using mind maps yourself.

Our Audience

This book will help you if you’ve ever asked any of the following excellent questions, which we’ve heard many times:

If developers are writing tests, what do the testers do?
I’m a QA manager, and our company is implementing agile development (Scrum, XP, DSDM, name your flavor). What’s my role now?
I’ve worked as a tester on a traditional waterfall team, and I’m really excited by what I’ve read about agile. What do I need to know to work on an agile team?
What’s an “agile tester”?
I’m a developer on an agile team. We’re writing code test-first, but our customers still aren’t happy with what we deliver. What are we missing?
I’m a developer on an agile team. We’re writing our code test-first. We make sure we have tests for all our code. Why do we need testers?
I coach an agile development team. Our QA team can’t keep up with us, and testing always lags behind. Should we just plan to test an iteration behind development?
I’m a software development manager. We recently transitioned to agile, but all our testers quit. Why?
I’m a tester on a team that’s going agile. I don’t have any programming or automation skills. Is there any place for me on an agile team?
How can testing possibly keep up with two-week iterations?
What about load testing, performance testing, usability testing, all the other “ilities”? Where do these fit in?
We have audit requirements. How does agile development and testing address these?

If you have similar questions and you’re looking for practical advice about how testers contribute to agile teams and how agile teams can do an effective job of testing, you’ve picked up the right book.

There are many “flavors” of agile development, but they all have much in common. We support the Agile Manifesto, which we explain in Chapter 1, “What Is Agile Testing, Anyway?” Whether you’re practicing Scrum, Extreme Programming, Crystal, DSDM, or your own variation of agile development, you’ll find information here to help with your testing efforts.

A User Story for an Agile Testing Book
When Robin Dymond, a managing consultant and trainer who has helped many teams adopt lean and agile, heard we were writing this book, he sent us the user story he’d like to have fulfilled. It encapsulates many of the requirements we planned to deliver.

Book Story 1

As a QA professional, I can understand the main difference between traditional QA professionals and agile team members with a QA background, so that I can begin internalizing my new responsibilites and deliver value to the customer sooner and with less difficulty

Acceptance conditions:

My concerns and fears about losing control of testing are addressed.

My concerns and fears about having to write code (never done it) are addressed.

As a tester I understand my new value to the team.

As a tester new to Agile, I can easily read about things that are most important to my new role.

As a tester new to Agile, I can easily ignore things that are less important to my new role.

As a tester new to Agile, I can easily get further detail about agile testing that is important to MY context.

Were I to suggest a solution to this problem, I think of Scrum versus XP. With Scrum you get a simple view that enables people to quickly adopt Agile. However, Scrum is the tip of the iceberg for successful agile teams. For testers who are new, I would love to see agile testing ideas expressed in layers of detail. What do I need to know today, what should I know tomorrow, and what context-sensitive things should I consider for continuous improvement?

We’ve tried to provide these layers of detail in this book. We’ll approach agile testing from a few different perspectives: transitioning into agile development, using an agile testing matrix to guide testing efforts, and explaining all the different testing activities that take place throughout the agile development cycle.

How to Use This Book

If you aren’t sure where to start in this book, or you just want a quick overview, we suggest you read the last chapter, Chapter 22, “Key Success Factors,” and follow wherever it leads you.

Part I: Introduction

If you want quick answers to questions such as “Is agile testing different than testing on waterfall projects?” or “What’s the difference between a tester on a traditional team and an agile tester?,” start with Part I, which includes the following chapters:

Chapter 1: What Is Agile Testing, Anyway?
Chapter 2: Ten Principles for Agile Testers

These chapters are the “tip of the iceberg” that Robin requested in his user story. They include an overview of how agile differs from a traditional phased approach and explore the “whole team” approach to quality and testing.

In this part of the book we define the “agile testing mind-set” and what makes testers successful on agile teams. We explain how testers apply agile values and principles to contribute their particular expertise.

Part II: Organizational Challenges

If you’re a tester or manager on a traditional QA team, or you’re coaching a team that’s moving to agile, Part II will help you with the organizational challenges faced by teams in transition. The “whole team” attitude represents a lot of cultural changes to team members, but it helps overcome the fear testers have when they wonder how much control they’ll have or whether they’ll be expected to write code.

Some of the questions answered in Part II are:

How can we engage the QA team?
What about management’s expectations?
How should we structure our agile team, and where do the testers fit?
What do we look for when hiring an agile tester?
How do we cope with a team distributed across the globe?

Part II also introduces some topics we don’t always enjoy talking about. We explore ideas about how to transition processes and models, such as audits or SOX compliance, that are common in traditional environments.

Metrics and how they’re applied can be a controversial issue, but there are positive ways to use them to benefit the team. Defect tracking easily becomes a point of contention for teams, with questions such as “Do we use a defect-tracking system?” or “When do we log bugs?”

Two common questions about agile testing from people with traditional test team experience are “What about test plans?” and “Is it true there’s no documentation on agile projects?” Part II clears up these mysteries.

The chapters in Part II are as follows:

Chapter 3: Cultural Challenges
Chapter 4: Team Logistics
Chapter 5: Transitioning Typical Processes

Part III: The Agile Testing Quadrants

Do you want more details on what types of testing are done on agile projects? Are you wondering who does what testing? How do you know whether you’ve done all the testing that’s needed? How do you decide what practices, techniques, and tools fit your particular situation? If these are your concerns, check out Part III.

We use Brian Marick’s Agile Testing Quadrants to explain the purpose of testing. The quadrants help you define all the different areas your testing should address, from unit level tests to reliability and other “ilities,” and everything in between. This is where we get down into the nitty-gritty of how to deliver a high-quality product. We explain techniques that can help you to communicate well with your customers and better understand their requirements. This part of the book shows how tests drive development at multiple levels. It also provides tools for your toolkit that can help you to effectively define, design, and execute tests that support the team and critique the product. The chapters include the following:

Chapter 6: The Purpose of Testing
Chapter 7: Technology-Facing Tests that Support the Team

Chapter 8: Business-Facing Tests that Support the Team
Chapter 9: Toolkit for Business-Facing Tests that Support the Team
Chapter 10: Business-Facing Tests that Critique the Product
Chapter 11: Critiquing the Product Using Technology-Facing Tests
Chapter 12: Summary of Testing Quadrants

Part IV: Automation

Test automation is a central focus of successful agile teams, and it’s a scary topic for lots of people (we know, because it’s had us running scared before!). How do you squeeze test automation into short iterations and still get all the stories completed?

Part IV gets into the details of when and why to automate, how to overcome barriers to test automation, and how to develop and implement a test automation strategy that works for your team. Because test automation tools change and evolve so rapidly, our aim is not to explain how to use specific tools, but to help you select and use the right tools for your situation. Our agile test automation tips will help you with difficult challenges such as testing legacy code.

The chapters are as follows:

Chapter 13: Why We Want to Automate Tests and What Holds Us Back
Chapter 14: An Agile Test Automation Strategy

Part V: An Iteration in the Life of a Tester

If you just want to get a feel for what testers do throughout the agile development cycle, or you need help putting together all the information in this book, go to Part V. Here we chronicle an iteration, and more, in the life of an agile tester. Testers contribute enormous value throughout the agile software development cycles. In Part V, we explain the activities that testers do on a daily basis. We start with planning releases and iterations to get each iteration off to a good start, and move through the iteration—collaborating with the customer and development teams, testing, and writing code. We end the iteration by delivering new features and finding ways for the team to improve the process.

The chapters break down this way:

Chapter 15: Tester Activities in Release or Theme Planning
Chapter 16: Hit the Ground Running
Chapter 17: Iteration Kickoff
Chapter 18: Coding and Testing
Chapter 19: Wrap Up the Iteration
Chapter 20: Successful Delivery

Part VI: Summary

In Chapter 21, “Key Success Factors,” we present seven key factors agile teams can use for successful testing. If you’re having trouble deciding where to start with agile testing, or how to work on improving what you’re doing now, these success factors will give you some direction.

Other Elements

We’ve also included a glossary we hope you will find useful, as well as references to books, articles, websites, and blogs in the bibliography.

Just Start Doing It—Today!

Agile development is all about doing your best work. Every team has unique challenges. We’ve tried to present all the information that we think may help agile testers, their teams, managers, and customers. Apply the techniques that you think are appropriate for your situation. Experiment constantly, evaluate the results, and come back to this book to see what might help you improve. Our goal is to help testers and agile teams enjoy delivering the best and most valuable product they can.

When we asked Dierk König, founder and project manager of Canoo WebTest, what he thought was the number one success factor for agile testing, he answered: “Start doing it—today!” You can take a baby step to improve your team’s testing right now. Go get started!

Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams

Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams

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