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

Figure 9-1 Sample story checklist

Mind Maps

Mind maps are a simple but effective way to search out ideas that that might not occur to you in a simple brainstorming session. Mind maps are diagrams created to represent concepts, words, or ideas linked to a central key concept. We used mind maps to organize this book.

It really doesn’t matter whether you purchase a tool such as the one we used or draw on a whiteboard or a big piece of paper. The effect is the same. Mind maps enable you to generate ideas and work in a way that is consistent with the way you think about problems.

How about an example? We’re discussing the story shown in Figure 9-2.

Figure 9-2 Shopping cart delete story

We gather around the whiteboard and start asking questions. Where should the deleted items go? Should they be saved for later approval, or should they just disappear? What should the screen look like after we delete an item? Figure 9-3 shows an example of the sort of mind map we might draw on a whiteboard.

Figure 9-3 Example mind map for shopping cart delete story

Spreadsheets

When possible, tools for specifying business-facing tests should fit well with your business domain. For example, spreadsheets are widely used by financial services companies, so for a project in the financial services area it makes sense to use spreadsheets to define examples of the functionality that a story should deliver.

Customers can write a few high-level test cases to help round out a story prior to the start of the iteration, possibly using some type of checklist. Some customer teams simply write a couple of tests, maybe a happy path and a negative test, on the back of each story card. Some write more detailed examples in spreadsheets or whatever format they’re comfortable working with.

Steve Perkins, the product owner for Lisa’s team, often illustrates complex calculations and algorithms in spreadsheets, which the team can turn into tests later. Figure 9-4 shows one of his worksheets, which performs calculations on the input values to produce the values in the ADR and ACR columns. This format is easy to get into an automated test framework (refer to Figure 9-8 for the corresponding FitNesse example).

Figure 9-4 Spreadsheet example from product owner

Look at tools already used by your business experts and see whether they can be adapted to document examples of desired feature behavior to help the development team better understand the story.

Janet has worked with several teams that have used spreadsheets as input into their Fit tests. This allows customers to work in a tool that is familiar to them but not waste any effort in translating them to an automation tool.

Mock-Ups

Mock-ups can take many forms. Paper prototypes are a simple but effective way to test how screens will work together. Drawing on a whiteboard can accomplish the same goal, but it can’t be passed around. Screenshots from existing applications can form the basis of a discussion about how to add a new feature and where it will fit into the UI. You may have used tools like these in other development methodologies. The big difference in agile development is that we create and discuss the mock-ups just as we’re about to start writing the code, rather than weeks or months beforehand. We can be confident that the mock-up represents what the customers want right now.

See Chapter 8 for Gerard Meszaros’ description of using paper prototypes and Wizard of Oz testing.

Lisa’s Story

We use simple approaches to creating mock-ups so that we aren’t tempted to invest time coding before we’re finished working through the mock-up. Often, we draw a UI or workflow on the whiteboard and then take photos of it to upload to our team wiki so our remote team member can also see it. At other times, a customer or our product owner draws the mock-up on paper or modifies an existing UI page or report to show what should be added and changed. The paper mock-ups are scanned in and posted on the wiki.

A picture’s worth a thousand words, even in agile software development. Mock-ups show the customer’s desires more clearly than a narrative possibly could. They provide a good focal point for discussing desired code behavior.

—Lisa

Figure 9-5 shows an example of a mock-up that Lisa’s team used to mock up a new report—simply by marking up an existing report that’s similar.

Figure 9-5 Sample report mock-up

Mock-ups don’t need to be fancy or pretty, or to take a lot of time to create. They do need to be understandable to both the customer and developer teams.

Flow Diagrams

Simple diagramming tools are helpful, whether the team is co-located or not. It’s often a good idea to capture in a more permanent form a workflow or decision tree worked out during a discussion. Flow diagrams can become the basis of a user scenario that might help you tie two or three user stories together. Let’s look at the shipping order story again that we introduced in Chapter 8 (see Figure 9-6).

Figure 9-6 Story for shipping charges

Figure 9-7 shows a very simple flowchart of a decision process for whether a customer’s order is eligible for free shipping based on a threshold order amount. Because we’ve discussed this story with our customer, we’ve found out that the customer’s order must not only exceed a threshold dollar amount but also must be to one address only, and it must weigh less than a shipping weight threshold. If all of these conditions are satisfied, the customer’s order will ship free; otherwise, the customer will have to select from the “choose shipping options” page.

Figure 9-7 Flow chart for qualifying for free shipping option

Visuals such as flow diagrams and mind maps are good ways to describe an overview of a story’s functionality, especially if they’re drawn by a group of customers, programmers, and testers. In agile development, we create these diagrams as we’re about to start writing tests and code. From these, the team can immediately start digging down to the detailed requirements.

Software-Based Tools

If we’re in a different location than our customers, we need tools to help us converse with them. Distributed teams tell us that desktop sharing is the number one tool that helps them deal with working in separate locations. Windows NetMeeting and VNC are examples of tools that let two team members in different locations pair-test. Video conferencing tools such as WebEx and Skype enable collaboration and demos between remote teams and customers. Online whiteboards such as Scriblink and interactive whiteboard tools such as Mimeo facilitate distributed whiteboard discussions.