This post is part of the “Testing for Agile Teams” series.
The agile way
- Remember the manifesto.
- Focus on delivering small chunks of business value in short cycles.
- Numerous implementations of the manifesto: Scrum, XP, Kanban, DSDM…
- Solve problems as a team of people who all feel responsible for delivering the best possible quality.
The agile teams
Agile testing includes everything beyond unit testing: functional, system, load, performance, security, stress, usability, exploratory, end-to-end, and user acceptance.
Customer team
- Includes domain experts, product owners, business analysts.
- Writes the stories or feature sets.
- Provides examples that will drive coding.
Developer team
- Everyone involved with delivering code (devs, SysAdmins, DBAs…)
- Agile discourages specialized roles — transfer skills to others.
Testers, a foot in each world
- Advocate for quality on behalf of the customer.
- Help the customer tell what is valuable and critical.
- Write tests and examples to ensure that’s what they’ll get.
- Assist the development team in delivering the max value.
- Testing in ways developers hadn’t originally anticipated (exploratory).
The agile flow
- Programmers never get ahead of the testers, because a story is not “done” until it has been tested.
- As a team member, you will need to be adaptive to the team’s needs.
- Automated functional tests are added to the regression test suite.
We don’t think of “departments”, we just think of the skills.
Tests, from the unit level on up, drive the coding, help the team learn how the application should work, and let us know when we’re “done” with a task or story.
This post is a personal summary of a chapter from the book Agile Testing: A Practical Guide For Testers And Agile Teams. I’m sure you’ll find that book useful too.
