Agile Testing

An Overview

Florian Heuer

• Publisher: Heuer Coaching
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9783958494435
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Software Development
• Index: Computer Science

As software moves increasingly to online distribution and frequent updates Agile development is fast becoming the norm. If you're considering moving from traditional development processes to Agile this book will give you the knowledge you need to get off to a smooth start.

Development And Testing

It’s once the development starts – whether it’s the first Sprint in a Scrum project, or when the first batch of tasks moves to the “In progress” column on your Kanban chart – that testing really gets under way. Let’s take the Scrum methodology as an example.

At the beginning of each Sprint there’s a Sprint planning meeting. This usually lasts less than a day and lets the team make a number of key decisions for the upcoming work cycle:

• Review the Product Backlog and decide which items will be on the Sprint Backlog
• Outline the Sprint Backlog and make time estimates for each task
• Identify how much of the work can realistically be done during this Sprint
• Finalize the Sprint Backlog

Once the Sprint Backlog is confirmed developers will have a list of discrete tasks to be completed. Suitable test cases will be needed for each task, and if you’re using Test Driven Development (TDD) those will be what you write first. It’s vital to get them right.

Test Driven Development

Because most Agile development is carried out using TDD it’s worth looking at in a bit more detail here. Using TDD, the team working on each item from the Backlog begins by planning what they want to do, deciding how to test it then writing the test. The process works like this:

1. Define the task. If you don’t know exactly what you’re trying to do, you can’t test to see if you’ve done it.
2. Write a test. It should be a small one – it only has to test for the new feature.
3. Run the test. Run the existing code (unless this is the first Sprint) through the new test and all the existing ones. It should pass all the tests except the new one, which it should fail. If it doesn’t fail it that means the feature is already in the code or – more likely – the new test isn’t working. Check and fix.
4. Write some code. Write just enough code to implement the new feature. Keep it minimal; all you’re trying to do is pass the test. Don’t start gold-plating and adding extra functionality.
5. Run the tests again. See if the expanded code passes the new test this time. If it doesn’t, fix it and try again. If it does, move on.
6. Refactor the code. When the code is written the only objective is to pass the test. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t do it in an elegant way; a pass is all that matters. Refactoring lets you clean up the code once you know it works.
7. Test again. Repeat until the code passes all tests and is at an acceptable standard for release.
8. Define a new task. Once that feature is satisfactory, take a new one from the Sprint Backlog or Work in Progress column and begin the process again.

This process is a great example of the iterative nature of Agile development. Instead of trying to write large sections of code then test and debug it all – usually a major task, and often a frustrating one – developers are always working with code that’s almost all functional. If the code fails a test the failure will be in the small section that was just added, because everything else has already passed multiple runs. This makes identifying and fixing problems much easier because you know exactly where to look for them. Contrast that to the traditional approach, where it usually takes more time to find a bug than it does to fix it.

Testing Automation

Agile methodologies involve a lot of testing, so to minimize time and cost it’s best to automate as much of it as possible. Some of the QA you need to do isn’t suitable for automation but much of it is, and you should work out at an early stage what you can successfully automate. This matrix can help you decide where to direct your efforts:

Phase	Task	Can Automate?
Iteratio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Impressum
• Inhaltsverzeichnis
• Introduction
• How Does Agile Testing Work? – Understanding The System
• Identifying The Objective
• Identify Stakeholders
• Vision
• User Stories
• Testing Plan
• Development And Testing
• Delivery
• Implementation
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Index