What’s Different about Testing in Agile?

§

Just-In Time Requirements Elaboration
–No SRS-level waterfall documents to drive testing plan
–Requirements and Test Cases developed in parallel or test first strategy

More Frequent Iterations, More Frequent Releases
–Testing needs to happen Early and Often
–Frequent to continuous regression testing
–High need to automate nearly everything
–Everyone needs to Test

Two Levels of Testing
–Iteration Vs. Release testing patterns

Need to Test early and often

§

• Need to test early in the Iteration – do not want mini-waterfalls
• Need to test on check-in – Don’t break the build
• Need to test nightly – Don’t wait for a Regression Iteration

Testing Pyramid


Manual testing:

“You can never have too many manual acceptance tests”

• Manual tests are ever increasing like little bunnies, before you know it you have hundreds or thousands in your regression suite
• You unintentionally dig a hole you can never get out of
• Whole team had to help run regression suite

Defect count typically is high

• Most defects were found as manual tests were elaborated
• Regression tests typically didn’t find many defects
• Commonly found defects – things we didn’t think of

§