The document discusses agile testing and the role of the agile tester. It begins by contrasting traditional QA with agile testing, noting that agile testing is more continuous and involves the whole team. It then outlines new skills required of the agile tester, including being a team member, using exploratory testing, and automating tests. Next, it walks through how a tester contributes at different stages of a story, such as exploration, estimation, planning, progression and acceptance. Finally, it concludes that agile testing requires a new paradigm where testers work with developers as team players.
This document discusses testing approaches on agile projects. It states that testing on agile projects focuses on finding and preventing problems through techniques like feedback and risk assessment. Testing is integrated into the development process and strips away extras like separate test documents, scripts, and tools. The key is for testing to adapt to changes in risk, skills, architecture and timescales as the process changes, and to involve everyone by making testing a part of development.
The document discusses quality assurance (QA) metrics in agile development. It begins by defining quality for both products and processes, noting that QA influence increases as development moves from requirements to validation. It then covers the types of metrics that can be used as a foundation for measuring product quality, including quantitative, qualitative, absolute, relative, and derivative metrics. Finally, it provides examples of QA metrics that can be used for daily monitoring of quality, as well as metrics that can be included in regular quality reports for sprints and releases.
Presented in BSPIN Conference (http://bspin.org/conference2014/) on "Succeeding in SMAC World". Had great interactions and glad to see great interest on Agile Testing concepts with Participants.
This document promotes switching from Quality Center to qTest, citing several advantages of qTest for agile software testing. Quality Center is not well-suited for agile workflows, has poor usability and integration, and is very expensive. qTest is designed for agile teams, integrates seamlessly with popular agile tools, and provides better visibility, collaboration, and test case management capabilities. Migrating from Quality Center to qTest is straightforward and qTest users report improved efficiency and a better overall testing experience.
I am a agile tester, because...(masterclass at the Barcelona Test Academy)Derk-Jan de Grood
These are the slides of the masterclass I gave 24-1-2018 at the Barcelona Test Academy. Using a assessment we started a discussion about what it takes to be an agile tester.
Description: Testing has transformed into Agile Testing. Testing has become a responsibilty of the whole development team. Many testers wonder what their role is now that everyone is testing. Some people say that Testing is WHAT we do and Agile is HOW we do it. In order to contribute effectively to quality solutions, agile testers need to combine the WHAT and HOW in their daily approach.
Time for a deep-dive. What defines the agile tester and how do we add value. In this workshop participant will fill ins an self-assessment based on the 12 characteristics of the agile tester. We’ll share the group results and create a snapshot of where we stand. Next, we will discuss each of the characteristics mean to us, how do they make agile testing work, help to boost the agility of the test process and how we can embed quality in the agile development process. In groups we will share examples from the trenches to go along with each of characteristics. What do we do to make it work, and what challenges do we encounter? Participants will help each other and be able to benchmark their own ideas.
This session aligns with the needs that I recognize with many colleagues. They are good testers, work successfully in an agile environment, but want to get better in explaining why they are a good tester. How does their attitude and approach contribute to valuable software solutions? Join this session if you want to improve yourself and want to get practical tips from the real world; If you want to learn what makes your testing agile and how is your agile mindset translated into a valuable testing approach. Participants can use the self-assessment to identify blind spots in their skills. Each of the participants will leave the room with a good understanding of where he/she stands: “I am an agile tester because…”
This document discusses testing approaches on agile projects. It states that testing on agile projects focuses on finding and preventing problems through techniques like feedback and risk assessment. Testing is integrated into the development process and strips away extras like separate test documents, scripts, and tools. The key is for testing to adapt to changes in risk, skills, architecture and timescales as the process changes, and to involve everyone by making testing a part of development.
The document discusses quality assurance (QA) metrics in agile development. It begins by defining quality for both products and processes, noting that QA influence increases as development moves from requirements to validation. It then covers the types of metrics that can be used as a foundation for measuring product quality, including quantitative, qualitative, absolute, relative, and derivative metrics. Finally, it provides examples of QA metrics that can be used for daily monitoring of quality, as well as metrics that can be included in regular quality reports for sprints and releases.
Presented in BSPIN Conference (http://bspin.org/conference2014/) on "Succeeding in SMAC World". Had great interactions and glad to see great interest on Agile Testing concepts with Participants.
The Definitive Guide to Implementing Shift Left Testing in QARapidValue
In today's digital world, even though most of the projects are following the Agile methodology, often testers might not get enough time to quantify the problem scope and test the product effectively. Even if a sprint lasts for two weeks, the QA team would get the complete functionality for testing, only two or three days before the sprint completion. Eventually, the QA team would have to rush the testing, struggle for test completion and even end up with improper test coverage and bugs being leaked into production. So the testing phase is often considered as a bottleneck for the release by the management.
Studies done by analysts suggest that the maximum number of defects occur during the requirement
and design phase of the software development life cycle. More than half of the defects occur during the
requirement and design phase of the SDLC, i.e 56% of the total defects. Out of this 56%, 23% occurs during the design phase, 7% in the development phase and 10% defects emerge during the other phases. 2019 witnessed test automation going mainstream with 44% of IT organizations automating more than 50% of
all testing and these figures are expected to go up in the upcoming years. Thus it becomes highly necessary to step up the testing game and ensure that it is done quite efficiently and this is where Shift Left Testing comes into play. Detecting defects early in the software development cycle can prove to be very crucial in regards to cost and efficiency.
This whitepaper discusses how shift left testing could help you reimagine the entire QA testing process.
Agile testing: from Quality Assurance to Quality AssistanceLuca Giovenzana
The history of the CHILI Agile transition from Quality Assurance to Quality Assistance.
Presented during a meetup:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZewEdNgo_oI&t=19s
and at the Working Software 2021:
https://www.agilemovement.it/workingsoftware/index.html
In this session, we would discuss what "Agile Testing" is, what are the well known methods and models of Agile Testing and what to expect on the future of Agile Testing.
Vladimir Primakov - Qa management in big agile teamsIevgenii Katsan
- Using a straightforward release pipeline with separate teams focused on new features or bug fixes to avoid context switching and overlapping work.
- Conducting cross-team planning and reviews to identify dependencies, risks, and adjust testing scope and approach accordingly.
- Establishing common processes, tools, and data across teams through alignment and documentation to facilitate collaboration.
- Ensuring infrastructure like test environments are automated, stable, and similar to production to support efficient testing across large teams.
This document provides an overview of agile testing. It discusses what agile testing is, common agile testing strategies and stages, principles of agile testing, advantages such as reduced time and money and regular feedback, challenges like compressed testing cycles and minimal time for planning, and concludes that communication between teams is key to agile testing success. The agile testing life cycle involves four stages: iteration 0 for initial setup, construction iterations for ongoing testing, release for deployment, and production for maintenance. Principles include testing moving the project forward, testing as a continuous activity, everyone on the team participating in testing, and reducing feedback loops.
The document provides an overview of the ISTQB Agile Tester certification. It begins by comparing traditional waterfall software development methodology to agile methodology. With waterfall, requirements are gathered upfront and the customer only sees the final product, while with agile development is iterative with working software delivered in short iterations. An example compares developing a word processing competitor under the two methodologies. The rest of the document outlines agile principles, practices for testing in agile, roles of testers, agile testing techniques and tools.
The document describes the offerings of a testing training company. It provides information on:
- Training programs in areas like agile testing, automation testing, security testing, and performance testing.
- Experience in training over 4,000 professionals across major IT companies in testing methods.
- Specialized induction programs and assessments for testers.
- Expertise in agile testing and being licensed trainers for agile testing certifications.
- Workshops on topics like test strategy formulation, risk-based testing, and test estimation.
QA Club Kiev 18 - Test Management and ApproachesQA Club Kiev
This document summarizes a presentation on test management and approaches. The presentation covered test management dependencies, test management in agile, alternatives to traditional test management, test reports, and comparisons of different test management tools. The presentation argued that specialized test management tools are not needed for agile and that agile teams can manage testing through their backlog, source control, continuous integration, and automated tests. Traditional test reports were deemed largely irrelevant for agile.
Let's explore what is agile testing, how agile testing is different than traditional testing. What practices team has to adopt to have parallel testing and how to create your own test automation framework. Test automation frameworks using cucumber, selenium, junit, nunit, rspec, coded UI etc.
This document summarizes a concise QA and testing process developed for a small startup. It includes protocols for building, testing, managing changes, and releasing software. The build protocol ensures testing receives builds and information about changes. The test cycle protocol defines different types of testing cycles. The change protocol establishes feature freezes and code freezes to control changes late in development. The release protocol details the release approval and packaging process.
Getting a grip on your test maturity using the ambition chartDerk-Jan de Grood
Agile test teams access their effectiveness every sprint. The power of retrospectives is that they, when done well, focus on improving in small achievable steps. This ensures that progress is being made and is more than just a far away dream.
Despite the above, I experienced that in and around teams the proposed improvements are measured and valued against the maturity of the agile adoption. I noticed that in several situations people were judging the performance of the team and the proposed improvements against an implicit blueprint; small improvements were fine “for just now” and regarded as a “good first step”. The implication of the above struck me! We all had our own plan and expectations, but these were implicit and not transparent. In reaction I developed the ambition chart. It is a graphical one-pager that gives insight in the current state, the collective ambition and describes the next step to be taken.
The ambition chart can be used to:
Discus and align expectations and ambition that individual team members have and create a team goal.
To break big goals into smaller steps
To prioritize improvement suggestions made in the retrospective
To manage dependencies between different area’s of improvement
To focus on the next step that needs to be taken, without being distracted by the end goal
Manage expectations that management and stakeholders have, e.g. by clarifying that the team does a lot of things very well, but address that it has identified some improvements that are not yet on the agenda.
To visualize progress and tell success stories to the rest of the organization
In this presentation I will explain how to make and use an ambition chart. I will explain situations in which it can be beneficial and share some examples of focus areas.
Relieveing the Testing Bottle Neck - WebinarCprime
When shifting to Agile, testing is often a bottleneck in the process, as it is the last step in the cycle. But, the responsibility to remove the bottleneck is not on the tester alone.
Ngôi nhà hiện đại không hẳn là một nơi để ở, mà hơn thế, đó là nơi con người tìm đến sự yên bình, tận hưởng cuộc sống và "cho thiên hạ biết mình là ai".
Este documento presenta una introducción a la adquisición, procesado y visualización de datos de Twitter. Explica las API de Twitter, incluyendo la REST API para consultas puntuales, la Search API para búsquedas y la Streaming API para consumo masivo de datos en tiempo real. También cubre conceptos básicos sobre grafos y herramientas de visualización como Gephi y GraphStream. Finalmente, menciona algunos casos de uso interesantes para el análisis de datos de Twitter.
A growing need for quicker and adaptive solutions to tech problems is pushing firms to adopt the agile methodology.
Today more and more companies are addressing different technology issues by adopting this iterative approach to
software development and releasing high quality software, faster and more efficiently. Organizations see agile software development as a faster way to create products, thereby reducing the Go To Market time.
A confused tester in agile world finalversionAshish Kumar
This document discusses challenges faced by testers in agile environments. It begins with a story of a confused tester and presents several case studies of different organizations' approaches to testing in agile projects. It identifies common challenges such as changing requirements, lack of information, testing pace, and skills. A survey found that test automation, risk tracking, and cross-functional teams are commonly implemented agile practices. The document concludes with principles of testing being a continuous responsibility of the whole team.
Testing for agile teams . What's the difference between this and other testing ? What are the goals for such testing ?
Is agile testing needed at all ? Why ?
You will find some answers inside and mist likely will be directed to the right way.
In many web or cloud applications, performance testing is critical part of application testing since it affects
business revenue, credibility, and customer satisfaction. Conventional software development models are known
to pushing the performance testing to the very end of project, with the expectations that, only minor tweaks
and tune up are required to meet the performance requirements from the business, however any major
performance bottlenecks found during this phase were major factors for delay in Go to Market. With more and
more companies are adapting the agile software development process which believes in performance testing
should never be an afterthought but it should tightly integrate from initial planning to production analysis of
software development lifecycle. This white paper explains how any company can integrate performance testing
into agile process, and key barriers for agile performance testing when team decides to adopt agile performance
testing.
The document discusses agile testing practices and principles. It emphasizes that agile testing focuses on quality over speed, with the whole team sharing responsibility for quality. Agile testers work collaboratively with developers to ensure software meets customer needs. Exploratory testing and test automation are recommended techniques. Continuous integration with Jenkins is presented as a way to get early feedback and detect defects.
Agile testing is the soware testing
methodology that stems from the Agile
soware development principles. The
essence of Agile testing practice is that it
incorporates testing into the dev process,
rather than keeping it a separate SDLC
phase.
Interview questions and answers for quality assuranceGaruda Trainings
Future of Software Testing is always good... as long as developers are developing projects we will be testing them and even when they stops developing then also we will test the enhancements and maintenance etc... Testing will always be needed
Customer will never accept the product Without complete testing .Scope of testing is always good as it gives everyone a confidence of the work we all are doing...Its always good to add more processes while doing testing so that one should not think that testing is a boring and easy job....Process is very imp. for testing.
Register for Free DEMO: www.p2cinfotech.com
email id: p2cinfotech@gmail.com
+1-732-546-3607 (USA)
How to overcome agile methodology challengesBugRaptors
One of the most significant elements for QA in agile projects is having a good understanding of the agile development procedures and processes. Many agile companies follow the Scrum framework for delivering quality software.
The document contains answers to 30 common QA interview questions. Some key points addressed include:
- The differences between QA, QC and software testing.
- When QA should start in a project and the role of QA.
- The differences between verification and validation, and smoke testing vs sanity testing.
- What testware, retesting, regression testing and data-driven testing are.
- Challenges of software testing like understanding requirements and time constraints.
- Factors for choosing automated vs manual testing and different SDLC models.
The document discusses testing in Agile environments. It covers traditional vs Agile testing approaches, the role of testers in Agile projects, and specific technical skills for Agile testers. In Agile, testing is iterative and incremental, occurring alongside development. Testers collaborate with developers to help define requirements and acceptance criteria, automate tests, and find bugs through exploratory testing. Their role focuses more on communication and facilitating quality than traditional documentation-heavy testing.
The document discusses best practices for integrating performance testing into an agile development process. It recommends:
1) Baking performance testing into every iteration to increase performance awareness across the team.
2) Automating performance tests and including them in continuous integration pipelines to run tests frequently.
3) Defining key performance indicators that the team understands and uses to quickly evaluate test results per iteration.
What is Agile Software Testing_ How to Perform it_.pdfkalichargn70th171
Agile testing is becoming increasingly popular as enterprises adopt agile software development practices. With the growing demand for faster and more robust digital experiences, businesses realize the importance of empowering employees with the right digital capabilities to meet customer expectations. As a result, agile software testing has become a crucial element of modern enterprise software development.
The document provides answers to 31 questions related to software quality assurance (QA) and testing. It defines key QA terms like QA, QC, verification, validation, smoke testing, and sanity testing. It also discusses topics like the QA role in a project, bug lifecycles, priority and severity levels of bugs, regression testing, data-driven testing, alpha and beta testing, test stubs and drivers, monkey testing, and benefits of automated testing.
Code campiasi qa-in-agile-projects-ana-figher-embarcaderoCodecamp Romania
This document discusses quality assurance and testing in agile projects. It defines key terms like quality assurance, quality control, and testing. It then explains how traditional testing practices have evolved with agile methodologies like Scrum. Quality is a team effort in agile, with all members sharing ownership. Testing focuses on providing effort estimates, exploratory testing, and continuous feedback in each sprint. Metrics are used to measure success and ensure a quality focused culture.
Transitions to Agile software development always seems complicated when it comes to QA. There are a lot of DOs and DON'Ts but it always seems that 2-3 weeks is not enough for all. In this presentation I cover how a change your mindset and on how you look at the typical problems you can address your challenges with ease and create a mindful process for your organization
This document discusses agile test planning and compares it to traditional test planning methods. It proposes a new template for agile test planning that combines elements of the IEEE 829 test plan standard and James Bach's heuristic test strategy model. The document reviews literature on agile principles, quality assurance, and test planning. It analyzes the components of IEEE 829 and identifies which could be adopted for agile test planning while still adhering to agile values. A research methodology using multiple case studies is presented to analyze the effectiveness of the proposed new agile test planning template.
Despite the belief that a shared context and collaboration drives quality, too often, software testers and quality professionals struggle to find their place within today's integrated agile teams. This session is a practitioner’s view of testing and testing practices within an iterative/incremental development environment. We will begin with a discussion of some of the challenges of testing within an agile environment and delve into the guiding principles of Agile Testing and key enabling practices. Agile Testing necessitates a change in mindset, and it is as much, if not more, about behavior, as it is about skills and tooling, all of which will be explored.
Advanced Techniques for Cyber Security Analysis and Anomaly DetectionBert Blevins
Cybersecurity is a major concern in today's connected digital world. Threats to organizations are constantly evolving and have the potential to compromise sensitive information, disrupt operations, and lead to significant financial losses. Traditional cybersecurity techniques often fall short against modern attackers. Therefore, advanced techniques for cyber security analysis and anomaly detection are essential for protecting digital assets. This blog explores these cutting-edge methods, providing a comprehensive overview of their application and importance.
Sustainability requires ingenuity and stewardship. Did you know Pigging Solutions pigging systems help you achieve your sustainable manufacturing goals AND provide rapid return on investment.
How? Our systems recover over 99% of product in transfer piping. Recovering trapped product from transfer lines that would otherwise become flush-waste, means you can increase batch yields and eliminate flush waste. From raw materials to finished product, if you can pump it, we can pig it.
How Social Media Hackers Help You to See Your Wife's Message.pdfHackersList
In the modern digital era, social media platforms have become integral to our daily lives. These platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Snapchat, offer countless ways to connect, share, and communicate.
Support en anglais diffusé lors de l'événement 100% IA organisé dans les locaux parisiens d'Iguane Solutions, le mardi 2 juillet 2024 :
- Présentation de notre plateforme IA plug and play : ses fonctionnalités avancées, telles que son interface utilisateur intuitive, son copilot puissant et des outils de monitoring performants.
- REX client : Cyril Janssens, CTO d’ easybourse, partage son expérience d’utilisation de notre plateforme IA plug & play.
Details of description part II: Describing images in practice - Tech Forum 2024BookNet Canada
This presentation explores the practical application of image description techniques. Familiar guidelines will be demonstrated in practice, and descriptions will be developed “live”! If you have learned a lot about the theory of image description techniques but want to feel more confident putting them into practice, this is the presentation for you. There will be useful, actionable information for everyone, whether you are working with authors, colleagues, alone, or leveraging AI as a collaborator.
Link to presentation recording and transcript: https://bnctechforum.ca/sessions/details-of-description-part-ii-describing-images-in-practice/
Presented by BookNet Canada on June 25, 2024, with support from the Department of Canadian Heritage.
Transcript: Details of description part II: Describing images in practice - T...BookNet Canada
This presentation explores the practical application of image description techniques. Familiar guidelines will be demonstrated in practice, and descriptions will be developed “live”! If you have learned a lot about the theory of image description techniques but want to feel more confident putting them into practice, this is the presentation for you. There will be useful, actionable information for everyone, whether you are working with authors, colleagues, alone, or leveraging AI as a collaborator.
Link to presentation recording and slides: https://bnctechforum.ca/sessions/details-of-description-part-ii-describing-images-in-practice/
Presented by BookNet Canada on June 25, 2024, with support from the Department of Canadian Heritage.
Quantum Communications Q&A with Gemini LLM. These are based on Shannon's Noisy channel Theorem and offers how the classical theory applies to the quantum world.
Measuring the Impact of Network Latency at TwitterScyllaDB
Widya Salim and Victor Ma will outline the causal impact analysis, framework, and key learnings used to quantify the impact of reducing Twitter's network latency.
Mitigating the Impact of State Management in Cloud Stream Processing SystemsScyllaDB
Stream processing is a crucial component of modern data infrastructure, but constructing an efficient and scalable stream processing system can be challenging. Decoupling compute and storage architecture has emerged as an effective solution to these challenges, but it can introduce high latency issues, especially when dealing with complex continuous queries that necessitate managing extra-large internal states.
In this talk, we focus on addressing the high latency issues associated with S3 storage in stream processing systems that employ a decoupled compute and storage architecture. We delve into the root causes of latency in this context and explore various techniques to minimize the impact of S3 latency on stream processing performance. Our proposed approach is to implement a tiered storage mechanism that leverages a blend of high-performance and low-cost storage tiers to reduce data movement between the compute and storage layers while maintaining efficient processing.
Throughout the talk, we will present experimental results that demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in mitigating the impact of S3 latency on stream processing. By the end of the talk, attendees will have gained insights into how to optimize their stream processing systems for reduced latency and improved cost-efficiency.
INDIAN AIR FORCE FIGHTER PLANES LIST.pdfjackson110191
These fighter aircraft have uses outside of traditional combat situations. They are essential in defending India's territorial integrity, averting dangers, and delivering aid to those in need during natural calamities. Additionally, the IAF improves its interoperability and fortifies international military alliances by working together and conducting joint exercises with other air forces.
An invited talk given by Mark Billinghurst on Research Directions for Cross Reality Interfaces. This was given on July 2nd 2024 as part of the 2024 Summer School on Cross Reality in Hagenberg, Austria (July 1st - 7th)
20240704 QFM023 Engineering Leadership Reading List June 2024
The agile tester
1. WHITE PAPER
THE AGILE TESTER
JoEllen Carter
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
CONTENTS
Executive Summary ..................................................................................... 1
Introduction..................................................................................................... 1
Traditional QA ................................................................................................ 1
Agile Testing Explained ............................................................................. 2
New Skills for the Agile Tester ............................................................... 2
The Tester and the Team ...........................................................................3
Conclusion ......................................................................................................6
INTRODUCTION
A mature QA process serves an
important purpose, one which must be
retained in the transition to agile.
TRADITIONAL QA
1
2. WHITE PAPER
In addition, business requirements often change after test tester on the agile team provides early feedback during all
cases are developed, requiring extensive test case re- stages of development, helps or is cognizant of code-level
writes and test plan changes, if the requirement changes testing being performed, takes the lead on acceptance
are communicated to both development and QA. If test automation building regression test plans and
requirement changes aren’t communicated consistently, uncovers additional test scenarios through exploratory
there’s a risk that business analysts, developers and QA testing.
may have different expectations of the final product.
In addition, the agile tester ensures acceptance test
As test case automation has become increasingly coverage is adequate, leads automation efforts on
important, QA teams have had to incorporate another integrated, system-level tests, keeps test environments
significant activity into the workflow. Larger organizations and data available, identifies regression concerns and
may have a completely separate automation group that shares testing techniques. Additional testing, such as
delivers automated test cases to the QA product team. performance and regression testing, that falls outside the
This adds another layer of required communication to an scope of story-level testing, can be addressed through
already significant load. test-oriented stories, which are estimated, planned and
tracked just like a product-oriented story.
Finally, since QA is usually the last activity before a
fixed release date, many planned QA activities may get NEW SKILLS FOR THE AGILE TESTER
squeezed from the schedule, compromising product
quality. Transitioning from a QA Engineer to an agile tester means
more than a change in when the product is tested and
AGILE TESTING EXPLAINED how much of it is tested at a time. There’s a new paradigm
for the agile tester — instead of being the Quality Police,
Agile testing follows a more fluid, continuous process the agile tester is a team player and works with the team
which takes place hand-in-hand with development to get each story to done. There are several skills that
and product management. An agile team doesn’t do make this paradigm shift a bit easier.
all of the requirements work for a system, then all of
the development work and then all of the testing work Team Member
consecutively. Instead, the agile team takes a small piece
of the system and works together to complete that piece The agile tester is a full-fledged, first-class member of
of the system. The piece may be infrastructure-related, the agile team. The agile tester participates in planning,
feature development or a research spike. Then the team estimating, scheduling, retrospectives and any other team
takes on another small piece and completes that piece. activities. Testers are generally thoughtful, analytical
The project marches toward completion piece by piece. problem solvers and often add a unique perspective to
the team in terms of identifying potential road blocks
Completing a piece of the system, referred to as a story and dependencies early in the process. Testers need to
or backlog item, means that product management, participate as members of the agile team, not just the QA
development and testing work together toward a team, to bring this information to the team’s attention as
common goal. The goal is for the story to be ‘done.’ soon as possible.
Stories are identified and prioritized by the product
owner, who manages the backlog. Stories are selected Exploratory Testing
based on their priority and effort estimate. The effort
Business requirements on an agile project may not be
estimate is another team activity, which also includes
as concrete as requirements on a traditional project;
testers. The team also identifies dependencies, technical
agile methods accept that change is a healthy and real
challenges, or testing challenges. The whole team agrees
part of software development. This means that test case
on final acceptance criteria for a story to determine when
generation may not be as cut-and-dry as it was in the
it’s ‘done’.
past. Exploratory testing is an essential skill to uncover
During an iteration, several stories may be in various additional considerations for the product owner to
stages of development, test, or acceptance. Agile evaluate. James Bach, Cem Kamer and other members of
testing is continuous, since everyone on an agile team the agile testing community have contributed numerous
tests. However, both the focus and timing of testing is excellent publications on exploratory testing techniques.
different depending on what type of testing is performed.
Developers take the lead on code-level tests, while the
The Agile Tester 2
3. WHITE PAPER
Automation
Agile emphasizes automating as much as possible.
Agile works best with some level of automation. But
many teams struggle with when, how much and what
tools to use. While continuous integration (CI) is an
accepted developer practice, the agile tester takes the
lead on incorporating automated acceptance tests into
CI and raising the visibility of end-to-end and scenario
testing results. Automation is not a separate project or a
tester-only activity and it’s not just test case automation:
is part of the story delivery process. Automation is
anything that allows the team to work faster and the
whole team supports it.
Communication
QA Engineers tend to rely on documents. Agile testers
don’t get a big requirements document as a basis for
test cases and don’t get three months to write test cases
before they see a working piece of code. They jump
into the communication stream, which may be verbal,
written, or virtual and assimilate the information they
need. They learn to ask the right questions at the right
time and provide the right level of feedback at the right
time.
THE TESTER AND THE TEAM
A single story walkthrough demonstrates what an agile tester does as part of an agile team. Here’s a simple story that
might be presented to an agile team:
An agile tester will contribute to the team from the time the story is presented to the team to when it’s completed, not
just during testing. Let’s look at specific contributions during these phases of work:
Story Exploration
Estimation
Story Planning
Story Progression
Story Acceptance
The Agile Tester 3
4. WHITE PAPER
Story Exploration
A story does not magically appear. There’s been work to get it to the team for implementation. The product owner has
researched the functionality, prioritized, ranked and sequenced it with other stories. However, this work has not been
done in a vacuum. Communication within an agile team is constant. Information flows between the product owner,
developers and testers continuously. The product owner may groom the backlog, but not without input and consensus
from the rest of the team. The product owner keeps the whole team aware of the product roadmap and future features
that are targeted for implementation. Every team member has some level of knowledge about the story and how it fits
into the big picture.
The product owner shares this information through:
Visible product roadmap
Release overviews
Iteration planning
When it’s time to schedule a story, the whole team will gather to explore the story and make sure everyone on the team
understands the scope. An agile tester might ask questions to clarify the scope of the story.
Is this option only on the login page?
Has the application sent email before, or is that a new interface?
The agile tester might also ask questions to clarify any vagueness in the story.
What does it mean for an email address to be ‘unknown’?
What does it mean to ‘require confirmation’ of the password?
Asking questions at this point is a delicate skill. It’s expected that there will be some unknowns in the system at this
point and there’s a certain amount of discovery that will be done as the story progresses. The idea here is to get just
enough clarity to be able to estimate the story, which is the next step. After refinements to the story, it might look like
this:
Notice how much more ‘testable’ the
story became. The additional detail
and clarification is valuable as the team
prepares to estimate the size of the
story.
Estimation
Estimation is another team activity to
which agile testers should contribute.
Different teams estimate at different
times. One team might estimate as
part of iteration planning. Another
team might estimate as part of release
planning. Yet another team might
estimate at a high level for release
planning purposes and then by more
detailed story points in iteration
planning. Every team needs to find what
works for their team, including how to
treat testing.
The Agile Tester 4