About the Book
Available for purchase online:
This practical book is for testers who find themselves on an agile team, test and quality assurance managers in organizations transitioning to agile development, and agile teams learning how to approach testing. The book starts with an introduction to agile testing, how it’s different from testing on a traditional team, and what makes agile testers different. The book contains dozens of stories from real people on real agile teams about the various testing-related issues they faced and how they resolved them. A section on organizational challenges covers cultural issues that agile testers face, team logistics, metrics, defect tracking and test planning.
One central part of the book uses Brian Marick’s agile testing matrix to go through all the different types of testing needed on an agile project, who does it, how to approach each type, and what tools might help. The test automation portion of the book looks at barriers to successful test automation, ways to overcome them, and how to develop a sound test automation strategy.
Another core section of the book takes the reader through an iteration, and more, in the life of an agile testing, from release planning to successful delivery.
Chapters available online:
Chapter 1 – What is Agile Testing Anyway?
Chapter 21 – Key Success Factors for Agile Testing
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Now available in eBook format!
More About the Book
In the book, we answer questions such as:
- As a tester, what is my role on an agile team?
- How do I transition from a traditional phased/gated development cycle to agile?
- How do we get testers engaged with the rest of the agile development team?
- What tools do I need?
- Who does what testing on an agile team?
- How can testing “keep up” with short iterations?
- How do we know if we’re doing a good job of testing? How can we improve?
- What do testers do the first few days of an iteration, before any stories are done?
- None of our testing is automated. Where do we start, and how do we find time to do automation?
This book teaches by example. It presents many testing challenges faced by real agile teams, including the authors’, and explains how those teams solved their problems. You’ll learn how apply different types of agile testing to your unique situation in order to guide development, learn about the product and apply that learning to the development and testing process.
Agile Testing Training Course – based on the book
We’ve developed a course based on the book and on our extensive experiences working on and helping agile teams. Our three-day Agile Testing course explains how testers can become valued agile team members, how they contribute to frequent delivery of business value, and how they can overcome common obstacles in transitioning to agile development. Students will learn techniques such as acceptance test-driven-development (ATDD) and the Whole Team approach that enable testing to “keep up” with coding in agile iterations. We’ve taught this course all around the globe. Attend a public course, or have us do a private on-site one customized to your needs. Please visit Janet Gregory’s training page for more information on the course and to register.
Thanks to Our Contributors
Thanks to everyone who contributed their experiences to the book, and everyone who reviewed draft chapters and made so many excellent suggestions.
Thanks to you, we think this book will help lots of agile newbies and teams struggling with testing.
Happy Testing!
Errata
These errors will be fixed in the second printing. Please email us any errors you find in the book.
p. xxxiii: there is reference to Key Success Factors Chapter 22, It should be 21, as there is no 22.
p. xli; Lisa’s website URL is wrong. It should be http://www.lisacrispin.com.
Downloads
Agile Testing Rough Draft Chapters
Our book is available at fine bookstores everywhere, as well as online.
Please see the home page of this site for links to two chapters on the book available online.
Thanks to the people who reviewed chapters as we wrote. The feedback allowed us to produce what we think is an excellent and helpful book.
Feel free to email us with questions and comments. We really appreciate your interest in Agile Testing.
Agile Testing Book Mind Map
Here’s our latest mind map, showing how the book is organized, and what’s in it.
Preface draft - how and why we wrote the book
The preface will give you an idea why we wrote the book, who our audience is, and how to use the book.