More Agile Testing: Learning Journeys for the Whole Team

by Janet Gregory, Lisa Crispin

Overview

Janet Gregory and Lisa Crispin pioneered the agile testing discipline with their previous work, Agile Testing. Now, in More Agile Testing, they reflect on all they’ve learned since. They address crucial emerging issues, share evolved agile practices, and cover key issues agile testers have asked to learn more about.

 

Packed with new examples from real teams, this insightful guide offers detailed information about adapting agile testing for your environment; learning from experience and continually improving your test processes; scaling agile testing across teams; and overcoming the pitfalls of automated testing. You’ll find brand-new coverage of agile testing for the enterprise, distributed teams, mobile/embedded systems, regulated environments, data warehouse/BI systems, and DevOps practices.

 

You’ll come away understanding

 

• How to clarify testing activities within the team

• Ways to collaborate with business experts to identify valuable features and deliver the right capabilities

• How to design automated tests for superior reliability and easier maintenance

• How agile team members can improve and expand their testing skills

• How to plan “just enough,” balancing small increments with larger feature sets and the entire system

• How to use testing to identify and mitigate risks associated with your current agile processes and to prevent defects

• How to address challenges within your product or organizational context

• How to perform exploratory testing using “personas” and “tours”

• Exploratory testing approaches that engage the whole team, using test charters with session- and thread-based techniques

• How to bring new agile testers up to speed quickly–without overwhelming them

 

The eBook edition of More Agile Testing also is available as part of a two-eBook collection, The Agile Testing Collection (9780134190624).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780133749564
Publisher:	Pearson Education
Publication date:	09/30/2014
Series:	Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Cohn)
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	544
File size:	10 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Janet Gregory is an agile testing coach and process consultant with DragonFire Inc. She is coauthor with Lisa Crispin of Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams (Addison-Wesley, 2009) and More Agile Testing: Learning Journeys for the Whole Team (Addison-Wesley, 2015). She is also a contributor to 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know. Janet specializes in showing agile teams how testers can add value in areas beyond critiquing the product, for example, guiding development with business-facing tests. Janet works with teams to transition to agile development and teaches agile testing courses and tutorials worldwide. She contributes articles to publications such as Better Software, Software Test & Performance Magazine, and Agile Journal and enjoys sharing her experiences at conferences and user group meetings around the world. For more about Janet’s work and her blog, visit www.janetgregory.ca. You can also follow her on Twitter: @janetgregoryca.

 

Lisa Crispin is the coauthor with Janet Gregory of Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams (Addison-Wesley, 2009) and More Agile Testing: Learning Journeys for the Whole Team (Addison-Wesley,2015); she is also coauthor with Tip House of Extreme Testing (Addison-Wesley, 2002), and a contributor to Experiences of Test Automation by Dorothy Graham and Mark Fewster (Addison-Wesley, 2011) and Beautiful Testing (O’Reilly, 2009). Lisa was honored by her peers who voted her the Most Influential Agile Testing Professional Person at Agile Testing Days 2012. Lisa enjoys working as a tester with an awesome agile team. She shares her experiences via writing, presenting, teaching, and participating in agile testing communities around the world. For more about Lisa’s work, visit www.lisacrispin.com, and follow @lisacrispin onTwitter.

Table of Contents

• Part I: Introduction
• Chapter 1: How Agile Testing Has Evolved
• Chapter 2: The Importance of Organizational Culture
• Part II: Learning for Better Testing
• Chapter 3: Roles and Competencies
• Chapter 4: Thinking Skills for Testing
• Chapter 5: Technical Awareness
• Chapter 6: How to Learn
• Part III: Planning–So You Don’t Forget the Big Picture
• Chapter 7: Levels of Precision for Planning 
• Chapter 8: Using Models to Help Plan
• Part IV: Testing Business Value
• Chapter 9: Are We Building the Right Thing?
• Chapter 10: The Expanding Tester’s Mindset: Is This My Job?
• Chapter 11: Getting Examples
• Part V: Investigative Testing
• Chapter 12: Exploratory Testing
• Chapter 13: Other Types of Testing
• Part VI: Test Automation
• Chapter 14: Technical Debt in Testing
• Chapter 15: Pyramids of Automation
• Chapter 16: Test Automation Design Patterns and Approaches
• Chapter 17: Selecting Test Automation Solutions
• Part VII: What Is Your Context?
• Chapter 18: Agile Testing in the Enterprise
• Chapter 19: Agile Testing on Distributed Teams
• Chapter 20: Agile Testing for Mobile and Embedded Systems
• Chapter 21: Agile Testing in Regulated Environments
• Chapter 22: Agile Testing for Data Warehouses and Business Intelligence Systems
• Chapter 23: Testing and DevOps
• Part VIII: Agile Testing in Practice

Editorial Reviews

Praise for More Agile Testing

“I love this book. It will help to create really great testers. That’s a good thing, since anyone who reads this will want to have one on their team.”

–Liz Keogh, agile coach, Lunivore Limited

“This book will change your thinking and move your focus from tests to testing. Yes, it is not about the result, but about the activity!”

–Kenji Hiranabe, cofounder of Astah and CEO, Change Vision, Inc.

“To my mind, agile development is about learning–that one word captures the true spirit of what agile is all about. When I had the chance to read through their new book, I could only say, ‘Wow! Janet and Lisa have done themselves proud.’ This is not a book about testing; this is a book about learning. Their clear explanations are accompanied by great true stories and an impressive list of books, articles, and other resources. Those of us who like learning, who love to dig for more information, can rejoice! I know you’re always looking for something interesting and useful; I can guarantee that you will find it here!”

–Linda Rising, coauthor of Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas

“Janet and Lisa’s first book, Agile Testing, drew some general principles that are still important today but left me wondering, ‘how?’ In this second book, they adapt those principles to today’s development landscape–with mobile, DevOps, and cloud-based applications delivered in increasingly compressed release cycles. Readers get specific testing tools for the mind along with new practices and commentary to accelerate learning. Read it today.”

–Matt Heusser, Managing Principal, Excelon Development

“An excellent guide for your team’s agile journey, full of resources to help you with every kind of testing challenge you might meet along the way. Janet and Lisa share a wealth of experience with personal stories about how they helped agile teams figure out how to get value from testing. I really like how the book is filled with techniques explained by leading industry practitioners who’ve pioneered them in their own organizations.”

–Rachel Davies, agile coach, unruly and coauthor of Agile Coaching

“Let me net this out for you: agile quality and testing is hard to get right. It’s nuanced, context-based, and not for the faint of heart. In order to effectively balance it, you need hard-earned, pragmatic, real-world advice. This book has it–not only from Janet and Lisa, but also from forty additional expert agile practitioners. Get it and learn how to effectively drive quality into your agile products and across your entire organization.”

–Bob Galen, Principal Consultant, R Galen Consulting Group, and Author of Agile Reflections and Scrum Product Ownership

“Janet and Lisa have done it again. They’ve combined pragmatic life experience with ample storytelling to help people take their agile testing to the next level.”

–Jonathan Rasmusson, author of Agile Samurai: How Masters Deliver Great Software

“In this sequel to their excellent first book, Janet and Lisa have embraced the maturity of agile adoption and the variety of domains in which agile approaches are now being applied. In More Agile Testing they have distilled the experiences of experts working in different agile organizations and combined them with their own insights into a set of invaluable lessons for agile practitioners. Structured around a range of essential areas for software professionals to consider, the book examines what we have learned about applying agile, as its popularity has grown, and about software testing in the process. There is something for everyone here, not only software testers, but individuals in any business role or domain with an interest in delivering quality in an agile context.”

–Adam Knight, Director of QA, RainStor

“This book has it all: practical advice and stories from the trenches. Whether you’ve never heard of agile or you think you’re an expert, there is something here that will help you out. Jump around in the book and try a few things; I promise you will be a better tester and developer for it.”

–Samantha Laing, agile coach and trainer, Growing Agile

“More Agile Testing is a great collection of stories and ideas that can help you improve not just how you test, but the products you build and the way you work. What I love most about the book is how easy many of the ideas are to try. If one message is clear, it is that regardless of your context and challenges, there are things you can try to improve. Get started today with something small, and nothing will be impossible.”

–Karen Greaves, agile coach and trainer, Growing Agile

“More Agile Testing is an extensive compilation of experiences, stories, and examples from practitioners who work with testing in agile environments around the world. It covers a broad spectrum, from organizational and hiring challenges, test techniques and practices, to automation guidance. The diversity of the content makes it a great cookbook for anyone in software development who is passionate about improving their work and wants to produce quality software.”

–Sigurdur Birgisson, quality assistance engineer, Atlassian

From the Publisher