Unit testing is a core component of agile development methodologies. Teams that perform comprehensive unit testing are perceived to be more reliable, professional, and advanced. Yet, many developers find starting unit testing is difficult. They test the wrong things, often with fragile tests that must be rewritten. Many give up even before realizing the value that unit testing brings. It doesn’t have to be that way! Gil Zilberfeld explains important principles for better unit testing: choosing what to test first, selecting the most appropriate tools, determining what to include in unit tests and what to defer to integration tests, measuring progress, understanding the differences between designing unit tests for new projects vs. legacy code, and more. Learn how to overcome resistance and get the entire team on board. There’s no reason to make the same mistakes others have made. Don’t get stuck with bad tests or the wrong tool.

Mature agile teams work together to ensure sufficient requirement information is ready when an iteration starts. However, on many teams, developers lack this support and may receive overly detailed-and often ambiguous-requirements that are “thrown over the wall.” Drawing on recent industry research and successes of companies with which he’s worked, Chris Duro shares stories from three companies that evolved an agile adoption requirements readiness assessment framework. They used this framework to quantify the requirements problems, obtain management visibility, and win improvements in their requirements process. Chris answers key questions about the framework: How is readiness defined and measured? What is the tester’s role in agile requirements development? How can agile teams check thousands of requirement document pages automatically?

In FDA regulated industries, audits are high-stakes, fact-finding exercises required to verify compliance to regulations and an organization’s internal procedures. Although exploratory testing has emerged as a powerful test approach within regulated industries, an audit is the impact point where exploratory testing and regulatory worlds collide. Griffin Jones describes a heuristic model-Congruence, Honesty, Competence, Appropriate Process Model, Willingness, Control, and Evidence-his team used to survive an audit. You can use this model to prepare for an audit or to baseline your current practices for an improvement program. Griffin highlights the common misconceptions and traps to avoid with exploratory testing in your regulated industry. Avoid mutual misunderstandings that can trigger episodes of incongruous behavior and an unsuccessful audit.

Agile developers often face the difficult task of defining user stories from business rules for complex applications-medical, embedded, insurance, banking applications, etc. In his consulting practice, Rob Sabourin helps teams elicit and describe stories for thorny business rules, multi-path conditions, time/event triggered activities, awkward dynamics, special cases, unusual constraints, exceptions, and non-functional characteristics. Using the popular board game MONOPOLY as a metaphor, Rob shows you how to develop user stories that focus development in different business contexts. He models MONOPOLY stories around personas-the little token players move around the board. If you land on Boardwalk’s hotel after rolling a third double, you Go to Jail rent free. Rent is not owed unless requested and is exempt if the landlord procrastinates.