Monday, 25 May 2009

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

Friday, 17 April 2009

Software Quality Assurance Planet

The Software Quality Assurance Planet is an aggregator for RSS feeds concerning software testing (unit testing, functional testing, regression testing, load testing), code review and inspection, bug and defect tracking, continuous integration.

Friday, 3 April 2009

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

Tuesday, 31 March 2009

Software Quality Assurance Zone

The Software Quality Assurance Zone is a repository for resources concerning software testing (unit testing, functional testing, regression testing, load testing), code review and inspection, bug and defect tracking, continuous integration. The content consists of articles, news, press releases, quotations, books reviews and links to articles, Web sites, tools, blogs, conferences and other elements concerning software quality assurance.