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

Agile teams that adhere to the true agile philosophy give all team members equal weight. Agile testers know they contribute unique value to their teams, and development teams have found they are more successful when their team includes people with specific testing skills and background. For example, a skilled exploratory tester may discover issues in the system that couldn’t be detected by automated functional tests. Someone with deep testing experience might ask important questions that didn’t occur to team members without testing experience. Testing knowledge is one component of any team’s ability to deliver value.

Enjoy

Working on a team where everyone collaborates, where you are engaged in the project from start to finish, where business stakeholders work together with the development team, where the whole team takes responsibility for quality and testing, in our opinion, is nothing short of a tester’s Utopia. We’re not alone in believing that everyone should find joy in their work. Agile development rewards the agile tester’s passion for her work.

Our jobs as agile testers are particularly satisfying because our viewpoint and skills let us add real value to our teams. In the next section, we’ll explore how.

Adding Value

What do these principles bring to the team? Together, they bring business value. In agile development, the whole team takes responsibility for delivering high-quality software that delights customers and makes the business more profitable. This, in turn, brings new advantages for the business.

Team members wear many hats, and agile development tends to avoid classifying people by specialty. Even with short iterations and frequent releases, it’s easy to develop a gap between what the customer team expects and what the team delivers. Using tests to drive development helps to prevent this, but you still need the right tests.

Agile testers not only think about the system from the viewpoint of stakeholders who will live with the solution but they also have a grasp of technical constraints and implementation details that face the development team. Programmers focus on making things work. If they’re coding to the right requirements, customers will be happy. Unfortunately, customers aren’t generally good at articulating their requirements. Driving development with the wrong tests won’t deliver the desired outcome. Agile testers ask questions of both customers and developers early and often, and help shape the answers into the right tests.

Agile testers take a much more integrated, team-oriented approach than testers on traditional waterfall projects. They adapt their skills and experience to the team and project. A tester who views programmers as adversaries, or sits and waits for work to come to her, or expects to spend more time planning than doing, is likely to cling to skills she learned on traditional projects and won’t last long on an agile team.

Peril: You’re Not “Really” Part of the Team

If you’re a tester, and you’re not invited to attend planning sessions, stand-ups, or design meetings, you might be in a situation where testers are viewed as somehow apart from the development team. If you are invited to these meetings but you’re not speaking up, then you’re probably creating a perception that you aren’t really part of the team. If business experts are writing stories and defining requirements all by themselves, you aren’t participating as a tester who’s a member of an agile team.

If this is your situation, your team is at risk. Hidden assumptions are likely to go undetected until late in the release cycle. Ripple effects of a story on other parts of the system aren’t identified until it’s too late. The team isn’t making the best use of every team member’s skills, so it’s not going to be able to produce the best possible software. Communication might break down, and it’ll be hard to keep up with what the programmers and customers are doing. The team risks being divided in an unhealthy way between developers and testers, and there’s more potential that the development team will become isolated from the customer team.

How can you avoid this peril? See if you can arrange to be located near the developers. If you can’t, at least come to their area to talk and pair test. Ask them to show you what they’re working on. Ask them to look at the test cases you’ve written. Invite yourself to meetings if nobody else has invited you. Make yourself useful by testing and providing feedback, and become a necessity to the team.

Help customers develop their stories and acceptance tests. Push the “whole team” attitude, and ask the team to work on testing problems. If your team is having trouble adapting to agile development, suggest experimenting with some new ideas for an iteration or two. Propose adopting the “Power of Three” rule to promote good communication. Use the information in this book to show that testers can help agile teams succeed beyond their wildest expectations.

During story estimating and planning sessions, agile testers look at each feature from multiple perspectives: business, end user, production support, and programmer. They consider the problems faced by the business and how the software might address them. They raise questions that flush out assumptions made by the customer and developer teams. At the start of each iteration, they help to make sure the customer provides clear requirements and examples, and they help the development team turn those into tests. The tests drive development, and test results provide feedback on the team’s progress. Testers help to raise issues so that no testing is overlooked; it’s more than functional testing. Customers don’t always know that they should mention their performance and reliability needs or security concerns, but testers think to ask about those. Testers also keep the testing approach and tools as simple and lightweight as possible. By the end of the iteration, testers verify that the minimum testing was completed.

Lines between roles on an agile team are blurred. Other team members might be skilled at the same activities that testers perform. For example, analysts and programmers also write business-facing tests. As long as all testing activities are performed, an agile team doesn’t necessarily require members who identify themselves primarily as testers. However, we have found that teams benefit from the skills that professional testers have developed. The agile principles and values we’ve discussed will help any team do a good job of testing and delivering value.

Summary

In this chapter, we covered principles for agile testers and the values we think an agile tester needs to possess in order to contribute effectively to an agile team.

An “agile testing mind-set” is customer-focused, results-oriented, craftsman-like, collaborative, creative, eager to learn, and passionate about delivering business value in a timely manner.

Attitude is important, and it blurs the lines between testers, programmers, and other roles on an agile team.

Agile testers apply agile values and principles such as feedback, communication, courage, simplicity, enjoyment, and delivering value in order to help the team identify and deliver the customer requirements for each story.

Agile testers add value to their teams and their organizations with their unique viewpoint and team-oriented approach.