Trade Review
Praise for More Agile Testing
“I love this book. It will help to create really great testers. That’s a good thing, since anyone who reads this will want to have one on their team.”
–Liz Keogh, agile coach, Lunivore Limited
“This book will change your thinking and move your focus from tests to testing. Yes, it is not about the result, but about the activity!”
–Kenji Hiranabe, cofounder of Astah and CEO, Change Vision, Inc.
“To my mind, agile development is about learning–that one word captures the true spirit of what agile is all about. When I had the chance to read through their new book, I could only say, ‘Wow! Janet and Lisa have done themselves proud.’ This is not a book about testing; this is a book about learning. Their clear explanations are accompanied by great true stories and an impressive list of books, articles, and other resources. Those of us who like learning, who love to dig for more information, can rejoice! I know you’re always looking for something interesting and useful; I can guarantee that you will find it here!”
–Linda Rising, coauthor of Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas
“Janet and Lisa’s first book, Agile Testing, drew some general principles that are still important today but left me wondering, ‘how?’ In this second book, they adapt those principles to today’s development landscape–with mobile, DevOps, and cloud-based applications delivered in increasingly compressed release cycles. Readers get specific testing tools for the mind along with new practices and commentary to accelerate learning. Read it today.”
–Matt Heusser, Managing Principal, Excelon Development
“An excellent guide for your team’s agile journey, full of resources to help you with every kind of testing challenge you might meet along the way. Janet and Lisa share a wealth of experience with personal stories about how they helped agile teams figure out how to get value from testing. I really like how the book is filled with techniques explained by leading industry practitioners who’ve pioneered them in their own organizations.”
–Rachel Davies, agile coach, unruly and coauthor of Agile Coaching
“Let me net this out for you: agile quality and testing is hard to get right. It’s nuanced, context-based, and not for the faint of heart. In order to effectively balance it, you need hard-earned, pragmatic, real-world advice. This book has it–not only from Janet and Lisa, but also from forty additional expert agile practitioners. Get it and learn how to effectively drive quality into your agile products and across your entire organization.”
–Bob Galen, Principal Consultant, R Galen Consulting Group, and Author of Agile Reflections and Scrum Product Ownership
“Janet and Lisa have done it again. They’ve combined pragmatic life experience with ample storytelling to help people take their agile testing to the next level.”
–Jonathan Rasmusson, author of Agile Samurai: How Masters Deliver Great Software
“In this sequel to their excellent first book, Janet and Lisa have embraced the maturity of agile adoption and the variety of domains in which agile approaches are now being applied. In More Agile Testing they have distilled the experiences of experts working in different agile organizations and combined them with their own insights into a set of invaluable lessons for agile practitioners. Structured around a range of essential areas for software professionals to consider, the book examines what we have learned about applying agile, as its popularity has grown, and about software testing in the process. There is something for everyone here, not only software testers, but individuals in any business role or domain with an interest in delivering quality in an agile context.”
–Adam Knight, Director of QA, RainStor
“This book has it all: practical advice and stories from the trenches. Whether you’ve never heard of agile or you think you’re an expert, there is something here that will help you out. Jump around in the book and try a few things; I promise you will be a better tester and developer for it.”
–Samantha Laing, agile coach and trainer, Growing Agile
“More Agile Testing is a great collection of stories and ideas that can help you improve not just how you test, but the products you build and the way you work. What I love most about the book is how easy many of the ideas are to try. If one message is clear, it is that regardless of your context and challenges, there are things you can try to improve. Get started today with something small, and nothing will be impossible.”
–Karen Greaves, agile coach and trainer, Growing Agile
“More Agile Testing is an extensive compilation of experiences, stories, and examples from practitioners who work with testing in agile environments around the world. It covers a broad spectrum, from organizational and hiring challenges, test techniques and practices, to automation guidance. The diversity of the content makes it a great cookbook for anyone in software development who is passionate about improving their work and wants to produce quality software.”
–Sigurdur Birgisson, quality assistance engineer, Atlassian
Table of Contents
Foreword by Elisabeth Hendrickson xvii
Foreword by Johanna Rothman xix
Preface xxi
Acknowledgments xxix
About the Authors xxxiii
About the Contributors xxxv
Part I: Introduction 1
Chapter 1: How Agile Testing Has Evolved 3
Summary 6
Chapter 2: The Importance of Organizational Culture 7
Investing Time 8
The Importance of a Learning Culture 12
Fostering a Learning Culture 13
Transparency and Feedback Loops 15
Educating the Organization 17
Managing Testers 19
Summary 20
Part II: Learning for Better Testing 21
Chapter 3: Roles and Competencies 23
Competencies versus Roles 24
T-Shaped Skill Set 28
Generalizing Specialists 33
Hiring the Right People 36
Onboarding Testers 37
Summary 39
Chapter 4: Thinking Skills for Testing 41
Facilitating 42
Solving Problems 43
Giving and Receiving Feedback 45
Learning the Business Domain 46
Coaching and Listening Skills 48
Thinking Differently 49
Organizing 51
Collaborating 52
Summary 53
Chapter 5: Technical Awareness 55
Guiding Development with Examples 55
Automation and Coding Skills 56
General Technical Skills 59
Development Environments 59
Test Environments 60
Continuous Integration and Source Code Control Systems 62
Testing Quality Attributes 65
Test Design Techniques 67
Summary 67
Chapter 6: How to Learn 69
Learning Styles 69
Learning Resources 72
Time for Learning 77
Helping Others Learn 79
Summary 83
Part III: Planning–So You Don’t Forget the Big Picture 85
Chapter 7: Levels of Precision for Planning 87
Different Points of View 87
Planning for Regression Testing 97
Visualize What You Are Testing 98
Summary 100
Chapter 8: Using Models to Help Plan 101
Agile Testing Quadrants 101
Challenging the Quadrants 108
Using Other Influences for Planning 113
Planning for Test Automation 115
Summary 116
Part IV: Testing Business Value 119
Chapter 9: Are We Building the Right Thing? 121
Start with “Why” 121
Tools for Customer Engagement 123
More Tools or Techniques for Exploring Early 134
Invest to Build the Right Thing 134
Summary 135
Chapter 10: The Expanding Tester’s Mindset: Is This My Job? 137
Whose Job Is This Anyway? 137
Take the Initiative 142
Summary 144
Chapter 11: Getting Examples 145
The Power of Using Examples 145
Guiding Development with Examples 148
Where to Get Examples 155
Benefits of Using Examples 157
Potential Pitfalls of Using Examples 159
The Mechanics of Using Examples to Guide Coding 162
Summary 162
Part V: Investigative Testing 163
Chapter 12: Exploratory Testing 165
Creating Test Charters 168
Generating Test Charter Ideas 171
Managing Test Charters 176
Exploring in Groups 183
Recording Results for Exploratory Test Sessions 185
Where Exploratory Testing Fits into Agile Testing 188
Summary 190
Chapter 13: Other Types of Testing 191
So Many Testing Needs 192
Concurrency Testing 194
Internationalization and Localization 195
Regression Testing Challenges 200
User Acceptance Testing 201
A/B Testing 203
User Experience Testing 205
Summary 207
Part VI: Test Automation 209
Chapter 14: Technical Debt in Testing 211
Make It Visible 212
Work on the Biggest Problem–and Get the Whole Team Involved 217
Summary 220
Chapter 15: Pyramids of Automation 223
The Original Pyramid 223
Alternate Forms of the Pyramid 224
The Dangers of Putting Off Test Automation 227
Using the Pyramid to Show Different Dimensions 231
Summary 235
Chapter 16: Test Automation Design Patterns and Approaches 237
Involve the Whole Team 238
Starting Off Right 239
Design Principles and Patterns 240
Test Maintenance 248
Summary 251
Chapter 17: Selecting Test Automation Solutions 253
Solutions for Teams in Transition 253
Meeting New Automation Challenges with the Whole Team 258
Achieving Team Consensus for Automation Solutions 260
How Much Automation Is Enough? 262
Collaborative Solutions for Choosing Tools 264
Scaling Automation to Large Organizations 264
Other Automation Considerations 268
Summary 269
Part VII: What Is Your Context? 271
Chapter 18: Agile Testing in the Enterprise 275
What Do We Mean by “Enterprise”? 275
“Scaling” Agile Testing 276
Coordinating Multiple Teams 283
Consistent Tooling 289
Managing Dependencies 292
Advantages of Reaching Out beyond the Delivery Team 296
Summary 297
Chapter 19: Agile Testing on Distributed Teams 299
Why Not Colocate? 301
Common Challenges 302
Strategies for Coping 308
Offshore Testing 312
Tool Ideas for Distributed Teams 319
Summary 322
Chapter 20: Agile Testing for Mobile and Embedded Systems 325
Similar, Yet Different 326
Testing Is Critical 328
Agile Approaches 329
Summary 337
Chapter 21: Agile Testing in Regulated Environments 339
The “Lack of Documentation” Myth 339
Agile and Compliance 340
Summary 346
Chapter 22: Agile Testing for Data Warehouses and Business Intelligence Systems 347
What Is Unique about Testing BI/DW? 348
Using Agile Principles 351
Data–the Critical Asset 352
Big Data 357
Summary 360
Chapter 23: Testing and DevOps 361
A Short Introduction to DevOps 361
DevOps and Quality 363
How Testers Add DevOps Value 371
Summary 376
Part VIII: Agile Testing in Practice 379
Chapter 24: Visualize Your Testing 381
Communicating the Importance of Testing 381
Visualize for Continuous Improvement 386
Visibility into Tests and Test Results 390
Summary 392
Chapter 25: Putting It All Together 393
Confidence-Building Practices 394
Create a Shared Vision 402
Summary 405
Appendix A: Page Objects in Practice: Examples 407
An Example with Selenium 2–WebDriver 407
Using the PageFactory Class 410
Appendix B: Provocation Starters 413
Glossary 415
References 423
Bibliography 435
Index 459
