The Software Tester in a Scrum Team

The integration of software in a Scrum team is not easy. As Agile software development favours continuous development in short iterations, the software testing activity should be completely integrated with the requirements and coding activities, not postponed at the end like in a traditional Waterfall approach.

Continuous Integration: Continuous Build or Continuous Quality Control?

The last Methods & Tools poll wanted to determine the level of adoption of continuous integration tools in organizations. The following question was asked: “Do you use a tool for continuous integration (automated build and unit testing)?”

I use tools for continuous integration	66%
My organization has tools, but my project or I do not use them	13%
My organization has no tools for continuous integration	21%

Participants: 130
Ending date: September 2010
Source: Methods & Tools Continuous Integration Tools Survey

A large majority of the participants is using continuous integration tools, but it remains to see how continuous is the continuous integration used by participants. It is easy to understand that this practice is one of the easiest to put in place as it is basically a pure technical issue of combining the build process with the unit testing tools. However, previous Methods & Tools unit testing execution surveys performed in 2006 and 2008 on showed that between 50% and 60% of participants were not using unit tests or were doing them in an informal way. Continuous integration could thus be considered by organizations more as a continuous build process that a continuous testing of the code quality.

Resources:

* Continuous Integration Feature Matrix
* Continuous Integration: The Cornerstone of a Great Shop
* Continuous Integration Tools directory

Writing Testable Code

This article presents practices to write more testable code with many examples in java.

http://www.methodsandtools.com/archive/archive.php?id=103

Agile Testing by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory

Some authors are good at presenting theories but unable to connect them to practice. Other are good at telling stories from the trenches, but without being able to produce an analysis of the situation and propose some solutions. On the less examined domain of agile testing, Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory are, luckily for us, presenting a book that covers both the personal experience of being a tester in agile projects and a conceptual vision of the place of quality assurance in software projects. Thus you will find in this book “stories” that comes from past projects and “mind maps” that helps to have a high-level vision of the material of each chapter.

The book offers resource to organize the quality assurance and testing activities in an agile project. It explains also the relationship between test automation and agility. It provides also a part dedicated to the chronicle of the agile testing activities during project life, showing how every member of the team could contribute to quality.

I think however that the more interesting contribution of the book is Testing Quadrants. This concept classifies testing activities depending on their focus (technology or business) and their intent (supporting the team or validating the product). Adding an agile perspective to the original work of Brian Marick, the authors provide resources and examples for each quadrant to make sure that you will cover all the aspects of testing for your project.

This book is certainly a very valuable resource for every people involved in software testing, even if this is not in an agile project. It will also be valuable for ScrumMasters and project managers that have to think on how to integrate the testing activities in their projects.

Click here to get more details on this book or buy it on amazon.com

Click here to get more details on this book or buy it on amazon.co.uk

What is an Agile Tester?

Here is a good definition of the Agile Tester, from the book “Agile Testing” of Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory: “We define an agile tester this way: a professional tester who embraces change, collaborates well with both technical and business people, and understands the concept of using tests to document requirements and drive development. Agile testers tend to have good technical skills, know how to collaborate with others to automate tests, and are also experienced exploratory testers. They’re willing to learn what customers do so that they can better understand the customers’ software requirements.”

Source: “Agile Testing”, Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory, Addison-Wesley, 2009