Read more about the article Agile Testing – Testing from Day 1 Presentation
Acceptance Test Driven Development

Agile Testing – Testing from Day 1 Presentation

At the 2019 Global Scrum Gathering in Austin, TX, I presented on Agile Testing. Below is the abstract of the talk, along with links to the Agile Testing blog series and the presentation slides. 2019 Austin Global Scrum Gathering Abstract: Many teams struggle with fitting in testing activities inside of a Sprint. They end up doing…

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Read more about the article Top 8 Things to Consider for Your Agile Testing Strategy
Top 8 Things to Consider For Your Agile Testing Strategy

Top 8 Things to Consider for Your Agile Testing Strategy

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.…

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What is Exploratory Testing?

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…

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Read more about the article Testing Green Field Applications vs. Legacy Applications
Legacy Code

Testing Green Field Applications vs. Legacy Applications

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…

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Read more about the article What is Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATTD)?
Acceptance Test Driven Development

What is Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATTD)?

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…

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Read more about the article What are Executable Specifications or Specifications by Example?
Use Executable Specification Instead of Long Testing Spreadsheets

What are Executable Specifications or Specifications by Example?

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…

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Read more about the article Why You Shouldn’t Do Functional Testing From the UI?
Focused Testing

Why You Shouldn’t Do Functional Testing From the UI?

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…

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Read more about the article What is Test Driven Development (TDD)?
Test Driven Development

What is Test Driven Development (TDD)?

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…

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Read more about the article Who Is Responsible for Testing in Scrum?
Who Is Responsible For Testing?

Who Is Responsible for Testing in Scrum?

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.…

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Read more about the article When Do We Start Testing in Scrum?
Task Board Indicating Quality Is an After Thought

When Do We Start Testing in Scrum?

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…

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Read more about the article What is The Testing Pyramid?
Agile Testing Pyramid

What is The Testing Pyramid?

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…

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Read more about the article How Many Tests Are Enough?
How Many Tests Are Enough?

How Many Tests Are Enough?

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…

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Read more about the article Which Tests Should We Automate?
Which Tests Can We Automate?

Which Tests Should We Automate?

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…

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Read more about the article What is The Agile Testing Quadrant?
The Agile Testing Quadrant

What is The Agile Testing Quadrant?

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…

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Read more about the article What are the Different Types of Tests?
Types of Tests

What are the Different Types of Tests?

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…

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