To summarize, here are the top 8 things to consider when developing your Agile testing strategy to enable you to continuously deliver a quality working product increment at the end of every Sprint Testing in not a phase 2. Testing is everyone’s responsibility 3. Testing starts on day 1 4. Do automate all scripted tests 5.…

Most manual testing should be spent on Usability and Exploratory Testing. These types of tests are non-scripted and thus cannot be automated. These tests need human interaction, observation, and analysis. With usability testing, a human needs to verify that the design, layout, and user interface of a business feature is intuitive, easy to understand, easy to…

When you are coming up with a testing strategy for green field applications, you should follow the testing triangle or pyramid. For legacy application, a different strategy is needed. Writing tons and tons of unit tests when working with a very large application with zero tests is very costly and results in very little benefits. A…

Acceptance test driven development takes the TDD practice and applies it to acceptance tests. On day 1 of the Sprint, before we begin coding a particular user story, we start by reviewing the acceptance criteria and thinking about how we will verify via tests that this story is complete. Typically, a single acceptance criteria might map…

Requirements and tests are just two sides of the same coin. You can’t have a user story or requirement without an acceptance criteria (test). These two meld into executable specification. Using gherkin syntax (given,when,then) we can represent requirements using examples and create specifications by example. As a potential customer I want to collect books in a…

In many situations, there are a lot of business rules that need to be tested. Say we want to test that the correct discounts get applied based on a certain number of items that are in a shopping cart. To test these rules, most testers will go through the UI and hop through several steps to…

Test driven development is a programming approach where before the developer writes any code, she first writes an automated test. This test will fail at first because no code exists. Then she writes enough code to make the test pass. After that she might want to clean up or refactor her approach, all along ensuring that…

Testing is everyone’s responsibility. The entire team works collectively to develop a quality product. Most of the automation is done by the people writing the code using an approach known as Test Driven Development or Test Driven Design (TDD). This includes unit, integration, component, and system tests. These tests verify that the application works as intended.…

What does your task board say about your team? Many teams have a separate testing column. This indicates that we are still doing hand-offs from development to testing and that testing is an afterthought. Testing is not a phase that happens at the end of a project and it’s not a phase that happens at the…

Most teams today use an inverted pyramid where most of the tests are manual User Acceptance Tests and System tests and are manually executed via the UI. Unit tests are non-existent or are too few to be beneficial. In order to have a maintainable test suite, as explained in this post, the base of our pyramid…

When trying to decide how to distribute our testing efforts and how many tests to write for each different type, it’s important to consider: Test coverage: How much of the code has a test that verifies its behaviorTest execution time: How long does it take to run the test and get a result backTest feedback: How…

When we look at the different types of tests and the Agile Testing Quadrant, which tests in which quadrant can we automate? In general, any tests that can be scripted can and should be automated. If we can map out a series of preparatory steps, followed by an action that results in an expected value or…

Brian Marick came up with a way to categorize the different types by 2 dimensions: Tests that support programming or the team and tests that critique the productTests that are technology facing and tests that are business facing Test that support the team: These are tests that help the team build and change the application with…

Test definitions vary. Sometimes they are categorized by type, level and approach. Below is my take on the different types of testing. Unit Testing: Verifies that a single unit of code (a specific behavior in a method) behaves as intended. Integration Testing: Verifies that two or more units communicating with each other behave as intended. Component…