Florian Heuer

Agile testing aims to eliminate the inefficient gap between development and testing

Firstly, it saves time; instead of testers waiting until a finished product is delivered to them then beginning their evaluation, they can test constantly. As well as reducing down time this lets them identify potential issues early and flag them up to the developers, who can fix them there and then before too much effort has been invested in the wrong direction.

With the development and testing staff working closely together the emphasis moves from completing each clearly defined stage of the process to doing whatever is required right now to advance the project

Here are the key principles of Agile testing:
Cooperative – Developers and testers constantly work together towards a common goal – a finished piece of software
Non-Linear – There are no stages to be passed through; all activity is development-focused.
Streamlined – Effort isn’t diverted into producing extensive documentation of what’s being done; the team does what’s necessary then documents what they’ve produced.
Adaptable – Agile can swiftly cope with changes in customer requirements or new technological developments.
Transparent – Information isn’t stovepiped within separate teams – everything everyone needs to know to complete the project is freely shared.

Sprints usually last one to three weeks and integrate development and testing throughout. A bug-tracking system is used to list all defects and time is built into the Sprint schedule to fix them. Any defects found by the client after the iteration is delivered are added to the fix list for the next Sprint. Feedback about that iteration is also included in the task list for the next one

One of the key advantages of Scrum is that it recognizes how often customer requirements change in the course of a project

The key to Kanban’s agility is limiting the number of tasks in progress at any one time

Many teams use Scrum as their main development process but add elements of XP to overcome specific roadblocks

Because most of the testing in Agile is carried out as a continuous process, not a discrete stage later in the development cycle, the testing strategy needs to be clearly understood right from the beginning

Whole-team testing is effective for simpler projects where a single team is working, but at a large scale it becomes difficult to manage. Where multiple teams are working in parallel an independent test team can support multiple development teams