Who hasn’t heard that agile testers are different?
They work upfront, hand in hand with the developers, are information radiator to the business, create automated testing frameworks, do exploratory testing, help getting stories done-done, are change agents etc. Right?
But how do you get there? And where is “there” anyway?
In this book, Crispin and Gregory define agile testing and illustrate the tester’s role with examples from real agile teams (collected from over 40 interviews with agile personalities). They teach you how to use the agile testing quadrants to identify what testing is needed, who should do it, and what tools might help. The book chronicles an agile software development iteration from the viewpoint of a tester and explains the seven key success factors
of agile testing.
Readers will come away from this book understanding
How to get testers engaged in agile development
Where testers and QA managers fit on an agile team
What to look for when hiring an agile tester
How to transition from a traditional cycle to agile development
How to complete testing activities in short iterations
How to use tests to successfully guide development
How to overcome barriers to test automation
This book is a must for agile testers, agile teams, their managers, and their customers.
Sloppy developers create sloppy code; no matter how “Agile” , without strong engineering practices, they just pile up junk code.
In this talk on infoQ Robert C. Martin outlines the practices used by software craftsmen to maintain their professional ethics. He resolves the dilemma of speed vs. quality, and mess vs schedule. He provides a set of principles and simple Dos and Don’ts for teams who want to be counted as professional craftsmen.
Richard Sharpe made a great interview of Jean Tabaka and Bob Martin on the lean concept of “ceasing inspections”. In this 7 minute video, Jean and Bob support the idea of preventing defects upfront rather than at the end. Quality Assurance vs Quality Control.
Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber spoke at Agile2006 on code quality as a corporate asset. InfoQ presents video of his talk, The Canary in the Coalmine. Schwaber discussed how a degrading core codebase paralyses a team and negates any Agility gained through process improvement. He proposed strategies for management to identify, track and stop this downward spiral.
Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory are working on a new book on agile testing.
If you are interested in reviewing chapters as the books goes along, check out their web site.
Test Driven Development (TDD) has become quite well known. Many developers are getting benefit from the practice. But it is possible that we can get even more value. A new practice is getting attention these days: Behaviour Driven Development (BDD).
BDD removes all vestiges of testing and instead focuses on specifying the behaviour desired in the system being built. This talk will be focus on Ruby and will introduce a new BDD framework: rSpec. The ideas, however, are language independent
You’re already an experienced tester. You know how to design tests and report bugs. Now what? Do you feel like an expert? Unfortunately, if you want to become very good at testing, there aren’t many classes or programs available to help you. This means you must manage your own education. This tutorial is about finding a path from experience to expertise. It’s based on the context-driven school of test methodology. It focuses on what it means to think like a tester and how to design and critique testing practices (rather than just copy what the “gurus” tell you to do). You’ll also get self-study strategies and methods for developing a colleague network. It’s an ideal tutorial if testing is your career and you intend to excel in it.
In this video (August 06), Lee Copeland discusses the definition of testing, how testers focus so much on the process that they ignore the real purpose of testing: “to create information”.
He then inspect the value of testing, and challenges testers to properly quantify this value to their clients, from developers all the way to executives.
