Crispin, Lisa - Agile Testing - A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams

Story Board

The story board, also called the task board, is used to track the work the team does during an iteration. Task cards, which may be color-coordinated for the type of task, are written for each story. These cards, along with a visual cue of some kind, provide an easy mechanism for seeing the current status of an iteration’s progress. It may use columns or different colored stickers on cards for different states such as “To do,” “Work in Progress,” “Verify,” and “Done.” The story board might be a physical board on a wall or a virtual online board.

Task

Tasks are pieces of work needed to finish a story. A task might be action needed to implement a small piece of a story, or it might be for building a bit of infrastructure, or testing that encompasses more than one story. Generally it should represent a day or less of work.

Technical Debt

Ward Cunningham first introduced this metaphor. When a team produces software without using good practices such as TDD, continuous integration, and refactoring, it may incur technical debt. Like financial debt, technical debt accrues interest that will cost the team more at a later date. Sometimes this debt may be worthwhile, such as to take advantage of a sudden business opportunity. Usually, though, technical debt compounds and slows the team’s velocity. Less and less business value can be produced in each iteration because the code lacks a safety net of automated regression tests or has become difficult to understand and maintain.

Test Double

A test double is any object or component that’s installed in place of the real component for the express purpose of running a test. Test doubles include dummy objects, mock objects, test stubs, and fake objects.

Test-Driven Development (TDD)

In test-driven development, the programmer writes and automates a small unit test before writing the small piece of code that will make the test pass. The production code is made to work one test at a time.

Test-First Development

In test-first development, tests are written in advance of the corresponding production code, but the code is not necessarily made to work one test at a time. Customer or story tests may be used in test-first development as well as unit tests.

Test Stub

A test stub is an object that replaces a real component needed by the system under test with a test-specific object that feeds desired indirect inputs into the system under test. This enables the test to verify logic independently of the other components.

Test Team

A test team performs activities that help define and subsequently verify the desired behavior of the system under test. The test team provides information to the stakeholders about the external quality of the system, the risks that may be present, and potential risk mitigation strategies. In agile development, these activities are fully integrated with development activities. Testers are often part of the development team along with everyone else involved in developing the software.

Tester

A tester provides information to stakeholders about the software being developed. A tester helps customers define functional and nonfunctional requirements and quality criteria, and helps turn these into tests that guide development and verify desired behavior. Testers perform a wide variety of activities related to delivering high-quality software, such as test automation and exploratory testing. In agile development, everyone on the development team performs testing activities. Team members who identify themselves as testers work closely with other members of both the developer and customer teams.

Theme

A theme is the same as an epic or feature. It is a piece of functionality described by the customer and placed in the product backlog to be broken up into stories that are sized and estimated.

Unit Test

A unit test verifies the behavior of a small part of the overall system. It may be as small as a single object or method that is a consequence of one or more design decisions.

Velocity

A development team’s velocity is the amount of value it delivers in each iteration, measured in story points, ideal days, or hours. Generally, only completed stories are included in the velocity. Velocity is helpful to the business in planning for future features and releases. Agile teams use their velocity for the previous iteration to help determine the amount of work they can take on in the next iteration.

Web Service Description Language (WSDL)

Web Service Description Language (WDSL) is an XML format for describing network services as a set of endpoints operating on messages containing either document-oriented or procedure-oriented information.

Bibliography

Books, Articles, Papers, and Blog Postings

Agile Alliance. “Principles Behind the Agile Manifesto,” www.agilemanifesto.org/principles.html, 2001.

Alles, Micah, David Crosby, Carl Erickson, Brian Harleton, Michael Marsiglia, Greg Pattison, and Curt Stienstra. “Presenter First: Organizing Complex GUI Applications for Test-Driven Development,” Agile 2006, Minneapolis, MN, July 2006.

Ambler, Scott. Agile Database Techniques: Effective Strategies for the Agile Software Developer , Wiley, 2003.

Astels, David. Test-Driven Development: A Practical Guide , Prentice Hall, 2003.

Bach, James. “Exploratory Testing Explained,” www.satisfice.com/articles/et-article.pdf, 2003.

Bach, Jonathan. “Session-Based Test Management,” Software Testing and Quality Engineering Magazine, November, 2000, www.satisfice.com/articles/sbtm.pdf.

Beck, Kent. Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change , Addison-Wesley, 2000.

Beck, Kent, and Andres, Cynthia. Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change. 2nd Edition , Addison-Wesley, 2004.

Berczuk, Stephen and Brad Appleton. Software Configuration Management Patterns: Effective Teamwork, Practical Integration , Addison-Wesley, 2003.

Bolton, Michael. “Testing Without a Map,” Better Software, January 2005, www.developsense.com/articles/Testing%20Without%20A%20Map.pdf.

Bos, Erik and Christ Vriens. “An Agile CMM,” in Extreme Programming and Agile Methods–XP/Agile Universe 2004, 4th Conference on Extreme Programming and Agile Methods, Calgary, Canada, August 15–18, 2004, Proceedings, ed. Carmen Zannier, Hakan Erdogmus, Lowell Lindstrom, pp. 129–138, Springer, 2004.

Boutelle, Jonathan. “Usability Testing for Agile Development,” www.jonathanboutelle.com/mt/archives/2005/08/usability_testi_1.html, 2005.

Brown, Titus. “The (Lack of) Testing Death Spiral,” http://ivory.idyll.org/blog/mar-08/software-quality-death-spiral.html, 2008.

Buwalda, Hans. “Soap Opera Testing,” Better Software Magazine, February 2004, www.logigear.com/resources/articles_lg/soap_opera_testing.asp.

Clark, Mike. Pragmatic Project Automation: How to Build, Deploy and Monitor Java Apps , The Pragmatic Programmers, 2004.

Cohn, Mike. User Stories Applied for Agile Software Development , Addison-Wesley, 2004.

Cohn, Mike. Agile Estimating and Planning , Prentice Hall, 2005.

Crispin, Lisa and Tip House. Testing Extreme Programming , Addison-Wesley 2002.

Crispin, Lisa. Articles “Hiring an Agile Tester,” “An Agile Tool Selection Strategy for Web Testing Tools,” “Driving Software Quality: How Test-Driven Development Impacts Software Quality,” http://lisa.crispin.home.att.net.

DeMarco, Tom and Timothy Lister. Managing Risk on Software Projects , Dorset House, 2003.