What is Agile Testing

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Permalink Reply by Kiran Kumar on March 5, 2009 at 3:12pm

Agile testing is a software testing practice that follows the statutes of the agile manifesto, treating software development as the customer of testing.

Agile testing involves testing from the customer perspective as early as possible, testing early and often as code becomes available and stable enough from module/unit level testing.

Since working increments of the software are released often in agile software development, there is also a need to test often. This is commonly done by using automated acceptance testing to minimize the amount of manual labor involved. Doing only manual testing in agile development may result in either buggy software or slipping schedules because it may not be possible to test the entire build manually before each release.

Historically, testing has always been about finding where the software breaks. In fact, when we talk about the qualities of a good tester we quote anecdotes about how "she was able to break my program in 3 minutes" or that "he found 27 bugs when running on Linux with Apache". In other words, testing was about finding bugs. Testers would get rewarded for and take satisfaction from finding bugs.

It seems to me that agile testing is more about keeping the bugs out than finding the ones that are in there. The (automated) tests that we write are more about showing that the software works the way we expect than about finding where it breaks.

I am not claiming that agile testers should not attempt to find bugs nor that pre-agile testers never write tests to show what works. My claim is more modest. I am claiming that agile thinking has introduced a change in emphasis.

In my pre-agile days, developers would bang away on the code until they considered it done. Then they would throw the code over the wall to QA to find the bugs. QA's first task would be to find the places where it would break. They'd submit a whole bunch of bugs which developers would fix. This cycle would repeat until they couldn't find any more.

Testing now happens closer to the developer in space and in time. Testers design tests to show that the software works as expected. The developers and testers work together to expand the set of cases that works. The bugs should never get introduced in the first place.

Permalink Reply by Sunil chaudhari on March 5, 2009 at 5:58pm

yes it was really help ful can u suggest a quick learning book on Agile testing?

Permalink Reply by KevinTMartin on March 6, 2009 at 9:30am

agile testing, by lisa crispin, published in 2009

Permalink Reply by Vidya Bandapelli on September 14, 2011 at 7:29pm

Thx Kiran for the information :-), it is really useful