agile

Ever growing software development needs and faster delivery cycles coupled with flat or shrinking IT budgets have brought many organizations to new agile and lean practices. Together, these disruptions are causing a sea of change in the application lifecycle management (ALM) landscape. Although management tools aren’t an explicit focus for most development teams, choosing the right tools for enterprise development is an important factor in keeping everyone productive. Monica Luke discusses the five key imperatives for ALM implementations: in-context collaboration, accelerating time to delivery with real-time planning, improving quality with lifecycle traceability, refining predictability with development intelligence, and reducing costs through continuous improvement. For each imperative, Monica offers concrete examples and lessons learned from real-world implementations. Don’t get lost in the weeds with an ALM tool.

Through his quality practices, Edwards Deming transformed Japanese industry in the 1950s and later American industry, proving that building quality intrinsically into a product dramatically lowers costs. Although agile development brings the software industry into closer alignment with Deming, we often continue to rely on end-of-process inspection and rework to ensure quality. A fresh look at Deming’s principles will help testers make a powerful impact on the success of the software projects and the organization. Mark Strange reviews how agile testing differs from traditional software testing, explores what test teams should be measuring (more than defect counts), and shares statistical techniques to help identify problems and bottlenecks in your testing process.

If testers sit passively through agile planning, important testing activities will be missed or glossed over. Testing late in the sprint becomes a bottleneck, quickly diminishing the advantages of agile development. However, testers can actively advocate for customers’ concerns while helping the team implement robust solutions. Rob Sabourin shows how testers contribute to the estimation, task definition, clarification, and the scoping work required to implement user stories. Testers apply their elicitation skills to understand what users need, collecting great examples that explore typical, alternate, and error scenarios. Rob shares many examples of how agile stories can be broken into a variety of test-related tasks for implementing infrastructure, data, non-functional attributes, privacy, security, robustness, exploration, regression, and business rules.

On agile teams, testing is an ongoing activity-not a phase or a role. Even today many agile development teams struggle with this concept. Janet Gregory explains how testing activities are included throughout the agile process and the highest value activities a tester can add to the team. Sharing her extensive work experience, Janet describes the importance of collaboration and simplicity in activities such as automation, acceptance test-driven development, and exploratory testing. Janet uses the agile testing quadrants model to provide a framework for identifying testing needs at all levels-user story, product feature, and project. As Janet presents this overview of agile testing practices, you’ll have an opportunity through discussions and exercises to understand how agile practices fit together.