Get a New Agile Attitude - Quality First

For decades quality assurance (QA) has been a back-end loaded process. Developers put the bugs in, and QA tests the bugs out. For nearly as long, testers have bemoaned the fact that quality can't be put in at the end, that quality must be built in from the beginning. Support for this view has grown from the grassroots within the development community and is now spreading like wildfire in the software industry. The practice of building (and testing) quality in throughout the development process has come from an unexpected source: Agile methods. Agile methods demand a strong reliance on both automated component testing and acceptance testing. Agile practices recommend that those tests be developed before the code is written and that the tests act as the true requirements for the software. Robert Martin examines the history, attitudes, techniques, and tools that are leading to a revolution in the very definition of QA and the tasks testers are asked to perform. At long last, it looks like there is a pragmatic way to "test then code."