Automated Testing in Agile

The questions I usually ask are:

1. What should I automate in the application?

2. How much of the project/application should I automate?

3. When should I start to automate the project?

4. Where should I put most of my automation resources?

Automating early and especially often in the project reaps the greatest rewards. We usually try to create the easiest of the automation's which usually falls on the developers to create unit tests. Working with the developers can be difficult at times because the mindset (sometimes) with developers is “QA tests the application and I build it”. Now teaming up QA and Dev is actually the best of both worlds. Both team members can play off each other’s strengths and fill the gap on the weaknesses.

Plus developers can run these tests in their own box (or development environment) so issues can be found early which means time and money savings for the project. Automating unit tests produces immediate feedback to the developers. Increasing your velocity is the key to this type of testing and employing QA/Dev team structures will greatly enhance that.

Automated Testing in Agile