Agile Testing

Mission: Helping testers and agile teams benefit from agile testing principles and practices, and enjoy continual improvement.

Co-Author with Janet Gregory: Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams , Addison-Wesley, 2009 (Available for pre-order on Amazon.com)

Please contact me if you're interested in agile testing coaching and training.

Please see my new website which I'm in the process of building up. I'm blogging there now. Please read and comment!

Announcing: Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams , by me and Janet Gregory, available December 26. Click here for a 35% discount. It's available for preorder on Amazon. Please visit www.agiletester.ca , where you can find sample rough draft chapters.


See my Last Word column in the October issue of Better Software Magazine , The Tester who came In from the Cold . I'd love to hear your comments!

Overview of Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams
This practical book is for testers who find themselves on an agile team, test and quality assurance managers in organizations transitioning to agile development, and agile teams learning how to approach testing. The book starts with an introduction to agile testing, how it's different from testing on a traditional team, and what makes agile testers different. The book contains dozens of stories from real people on real agile teams about the various testing-related issues they faced and how they resolved them. A section on organizational challenges covers cultural issues that agile testers face, team logistics, metrics, defect tracking and test planning. One central part of the book uses Brian Marick's agile testing matrix to go through all the different types of testing needed on an agile project, who does it, how to approach each type, and what tools might help. The test automation portion of the book looks at barriers to successful test automation, ways to overcome them, and how to develop a sound test automation strategy. Another core section of the book takes the reader through an iteration, and more, in the life of an agile testing, from release planning to successful delivery.
In the book, we answer questions such as:

As a tester, what is my role on an agile team?

How do I transition from a traditional phased/gated development cycle to agile?

How do we get testers engaged with the rest of the agile development team?

What tools do I need?

Who does what testing on an agile team?

How can testing "keep up" with short iterations?

How do we know if we're doing a good job of testing? How can we improve?

What do testers do the first few days of an iteration, before any stories are done?

None of our testing is automated. Where do we start, and how do we find time to do automation?

This book teaches by example. It presents many testing challenges faced by real agile teams, including the authors', and explains how those teams solved their problems. You'll learn how apply different types of agile testing to your unique situation in order to guide development, learn about the product and apply that learning to the development and testing process.

Current book recommendations:
Scrum and XP from the Trenches by Henrik Kniberg, forewords by Mike Cohn and Jeff Sutherland. Available on Amazon.

The Art of Agile Development by James Shore and Shane Warden does a great job of explaining all aspects of agile development, and has good sections on testing including Exploratory Testing by Elisabeth Hendrickson.


"I think the American people have forgotten how to tell a good candidate from a bad one...Justice, freedom, equality and prosperity do not just happen. If we think that they do, if we think that somehow they are here as a gift, rather than as the compensation for sustained endeavor we will lose them." --Ken Gordon, Senate Majority Leader, Colorado

Articles and Other Stuff

• To Track or Not To track, Better Software, June 2007
• "An Agile Tool Selection Strategy for Web Testing Tools", Methods and Tools, Summer 2007
• Driving Software Quality: How Test-Driven Development Impacts Software Quality", IEEE Software, Vol. 23, No. 6 November/December 2006
• My Better Software "Last Word" column, "The Democratization of Test Tools", July 2006
• My Better Software article "Hiring an Agile Tester" with Joe Yakich, March 2006
• Stickynotes for "Hiring an Agile Tester"
  
• My Better Software "Tool Look" article on Canoo WebTest
• Stickynotes for my Tool Look column on Canoo WebTest in November 2005 Issue of Better Software
• "Driving Development with Customer Tests" Article in Summer 2005 Issue of Methods and Tools
• Interview with Magnus Lladas of Citerus on testing and XP.
• Radio interview along with James Newkirk, on Danish radio, during JAOO in 2004.
• Review of Testing XP in UnixReview.com!
• Link to my Sept. 2003 article in Better Software, "You Don't Say"
• Article in Summer 2003 Issue of Methods and Tools
• Notes from Introducing Agile Technical Exchange at ADC
• "Testing Extreme Programming" on Amazon.com
• "Extreme Rules of the Road: How an XP Tester Can Drive Success", STQE Magazine, July 2000
• "QA Consciousness Raising", STQE Magazine, October 2002
• XP Tester Bill of Rights from Testing Extreme Programming

More Recommended Books
"Collaboration Explained : Facilitation Skills for Software Project Leaders" by Jean Tabaka fills a big gap in understanding how to help agile teams succeed. Book Description on Amazon

"Agile Planning and Estimating" by Mike Cohn is a must-read book for anyone involved in software development - agile or not! Book Description on Amazon