Testing in Agile and eXtreme Projects

The material in this tutorial is taken from the book Software Testing Fundamentals,” authored by the presenter (Published by Wiley, May 2003) and from a new work in progress, "Agile Testing."

 Market pressures drive us to produce products faster and faster.  The latest programming APIs make it easier than ever for programmers to crank out tons of code.  The makers claim that these APIs also solve all kinds of problems that used to create bugs; so now there will be no more bugs in the code.  The programming communities’ latest programming models, Agile and eXtreme purport to be fully self sufficient; no testers required. –At least that is the story that is going around.  Some of these things are true some of the time, but there is still a need for testing in Agile and eXtreme projects. 

 This tutorial shows you how Agile development is supposed to work, why there is still a job for testers, and how test efforts can be Agile too.  Three Agile / eXtreme case studies are presented to show how various tools and test strategies worked in real projects, and to illustrate pitfalls that can be avoided. 

Topics discussed in this tutorial include:

• Introduction to Agile programming concepts and measurement
• Teaming and tools that support team activities
• Responsive use of risk ranking to identify critical tests
• Bug tracking and ranking strategies that maximize productivity
• Ways to demonstrate the dollar value of testing and its contribution to the success of the product

Tutorial Outline

• Introduction: What is Agile programming anyway?
  • Why use it?
  • How Agile is different from Traditional development projects?
• What is different in an Agile test effort
• The goals of an agile test effort
  • Be Agile, efficient and effective
  • Demonstrate the cost of not testing (the best way to show the value of testing)
    • Case Study: Propping it up with support
• How to test in an Agile/eXtreme effort
  • Case Study: The 401k eXtreme Web Project
• Test tools for the Agile effort
  • Inventories
  • Risk analysis and the most important tests
  • S-Curves
• Case Study: A Successful Agile Effort
  • Bug ranking strategies for Agile Efforts

 

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Last modified: August 13, 2008