Professional Documents
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WP AgileTester
WP AgileTester
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
CONTENTS
Executive Summary...................................................................................... 1
Introduction...................................................................................................... 1
Traditional QA................................................................................................. 1
Agile Testing Explained.............................................................................. 2
New Skills for the Agile Tester ................................................................ 2
The Tester and the Team............................................................................3
Conclusion.......................................................................................................6
INTRODUCTION
TRADITIONAL QA
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In addition, business requirements often change after test
cases are developed, requiring extensive test case rewrites and test plan changes, if the requirement changes
are communicated to both development and QA. If
requirement changes arent communicated consistently,
theres a risk that business analysts, developers and QA
may have different expectations of the final product.
As test case automation has become increasingly
important, QA teams have had to incorporate another
significant activity into the workflow. Larger organizations
may have a completely separate automation group that
delivers automated test cases to the QA product team.
This adds another layer of required communication to an
already significant load.
Finally, since QA is usually the last activity before a
fixed release date, many planned QA activities may get
squeezed from the schedule, compromising product
quality.
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Automation
Agile emphasizes automating as much as possible.
Agile works best with some level of automation. But
many teams struggle with when, how much and what
tools to use. While continuous integration (CI) is an
accepted developer practice, the agile tester takes the
lead on incorporating automated acceptance tests into
CI and raising the visibility of end-to-end and scenario
testing results. Automation is not a separate project or a
tester-only activity and its not just test case automation:
is part of the story delivery process. Automation is
anything that allows the team to work faster and the
whole team supports it.
Communication
QA Engineers tend to rely on documents. Agile testers
dont get a big requirements document as a basis for
test cases and dont get three months to write test cases
before they see a working piece of code. They jump
into the communication stream, which may be verbal,
written, or virtual and assimilate the information they
need. They learn to ask the right questions at the right
time and provide the right level of feedback at the right
time.
Story Exploration
Estimation
Story Planning
Story Progression
Story Acceptance
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Story Exploration
A story does not magically appear. Theres been work to get it to the team for implementation. The product owner has
researched the functionality, prioritized, ranked and sequenced it with other stories. However, this work has not been
done in a vacuum. Communication within an agile team is constant. Information flows between the product owner,
developers and testers continuously. The product owner may groom the backlog, but not without input and consensus
from the rest of the team. The product owner keeps the whole team aware of the product roadmap and future features
that are targeted for implementation. Every team member has some level of knowledge about the story and how it fits
into the big picture.
The product owner shares this information through:
Release overviews
Iteration planning
When its time to schedule a story, the whole team will gather to explore the story and make sure everyone on the team
understands the scope. An agile tester might ask questions to clarify the scope of the story.
The agile tester might also ask questions to clarify any vagueness in the story.
Asking questions at this point is a delicate skill. Its expected that there will be some unknowns in the system at this
point and theres a certain amount of discovery that will be done as the story progresses. The idea here is to get just
enough clarity to be able to estimate the story, which is the next step. After refinements to the story, it might look like
this:
Notice how much more testable the
story became. The additional detail
and clarification is valuable as the team
prepares to estimate the size of the
story.
Estimation
Estimation is another team activity to
which agile testers should contribute.
Different teams estimate at different
times. One team might estimate as
part of iteration planning. Another
team might estimate as part of release
planning. Yet another team might
estimate at a high level for release
planning purposes and then by more
detailed story points in iteration
planning. Every team needs to find what
works for their team, including how to
treat testing.
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CONCLUSION
AUTHORS BIO
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