6 Quick Suggestions to Get Your Agile Testing Off On The Right Foot

From the Agile Manifesto

“Individuals and interactions over processes and tools” “Working software over comprehensive documentation” “Customer collaboration over contract negotiation” “Responding to change over following a plan”

When Agile succeeds I believe it is because testing has been front and center in the development process. By adding QA into the development process by working with them (dev) defining and building unit tests (when applicable) creates extremely orderly code. Before coding for the new application development works on unit tests creating programming code rather than mounds of documents which was the case with the Waterfall Methodology. Here are a few suggestions that come to mind when starting an agile project.

1. QA will try, but we simply will not find all of the bugs, the software has become increasingly complex. QA’s job should be to improve the software helping to produce a better product and know that working software is the primary measure of progress.

2. Team up QA with the Business Team, Product Management and define the testing strategy early on (this cannot be stressed enough)

3. This type of methodology creates a merging of QA and PM tasks so review all of your test plans or documents related to the project as a team.

4. Tell stories in your Use Cases (user stories), writing very detailed use cases with a lot of text and description will not do. It is an iterative process where you work and refine; you can and will refine it later.

5. Share your data QA manager! we used a wiki so the entire team could see reports like the total number of cases written, lessons learned, turnover document, etc.

6. Community testing surrounds the new application with individuals that are your user base. You will truly understand what the business is truly looking for with the project and gain insight on new ways to test the system just by working with the individuals that actually use the system.