The software world experiences continual technological change. Just look at how AI is taking it by storm right now. Other changes seem much slower. Test-driven development, for example, is a long way from crossing the chasm after being around for decades.
We wrote our first book, Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams, 15 years ago. It met a need since there was no literature about testing beyond what developers did and customers could do. There were a lot of testing activities that wasn’t covered in any books until that book came out (exception – Lisa’s book on Testing in XP). As we added to our knowledge and experience over the years, we co-authored three more books. Recently, we decided to go back to the first book and see how it’s holding up.
What would we change?
Happily, we find that overall, Agile Testing is still relevant and useful. There are many things that we learned later that we added to subsequent books. But overall, there is not much we would change, which is why we never did a second edition. Still, here are a few things that stood out to us.
Most cringeworthy, in Chapter 4, we have a section headed “Resources” that is about team make-up. We can’t believe we would ever have used that word when talking about people! But there it is. When we say resources now, we mean computers, tools, etc.
We probably would also try to make it a bit smaller but not sure if that was possible at the time since we had so much information to share.
A community effort
Revisiting the book reminded us of all the incredibly helpful contributions we got in the form of sidebars from many leading practitioners. We included even more in More Agile Testing – 70 sidebars from 40 contributors. What a helpful community we have.
The automation section in particular has excellent sidebars from awesome folks. This whole section is still super relevant. Let’s dive into that a bit.
Automation
At the time we wrote the book, Lisa was working on a team where the testers took most of the responsibility to automate at the UI level, although other team members helped. Since then, Lisa has worked in teams where the people writing the production code were responsible for automation at all levels. They paired and did ensemble (mob) programming to involve testers and other specialists which saves time and leads to more maintainable and trustworthy automated tests.
There are more options for generating test data today than there were 15 years ago. For example, you can get ChatGPT or one of the plug-in IDE coding assistants to create and tear down data for an automated test. We have more tools in our toolbox, although the values and principles remain the same.
Speaking of tools, in Agile Testing, we talked about the pros and cons of “home-brewed” tools, such as automation frameworks. Today, there are so many different open-source tools, frameworks and libraries available, we see fewer cases where teams need to build their own. It’s good to avoid cognitive load and free the team to focus on what they can do for the business. Pay for the things that other people and companies do well – one area where technological change has led to a mindset change for us.
API test tools are a case in point. Even 10 years ago, Lisa was still testing APIs with cURL commands. Then tools like Postman and REST-assured came on the scene. They’re huge time-savers and help to get more team members involved in the testing.
Later additions => more books
What would we add? We had enough for three more books: More Agile Testing, Agile Testing Condensed, and Holistic Testing. Here are a few examples of what we added:
• Testing in large organizations or remote teams, within regulatory environments or on mobile apps
• Testing activities on the right-hand side of the Holistic Testing loop, such as observability, testing in production, synthetic testing
• New practices to build shared understanding, such as Matt Wynne’s example mapping
• DORA metrics and other ways to measure product and process quality
• Later innovations in exploratory testing, such as Elisabeth Hendrickson’s charters
Our favorite models like the test automation pyramid and the agile testing quadrants have also evolved. We talked about those changes in our later books. We also came up with an entirely new model, as discussed in our newest book, Holistic Testing: Weave Quality Into Your Product.
Happily, there are new publications, courses, websites, webinars, and more that we could cite and put in the book’s bibliography. Again, we’ve done so in the later books, and also in our own blog posts and video chats.
Second Edition?
If we did a second edition, we’d change the name of “Principles for Agile Testers” to “Agile Testing Principles”. We’d talk more about testing activities rather than the tester role, however in the world 2009 it made sense to consider the tester role. We’d include the definition of “agile testing” that we developed later with the help of several members of the agile community. And we might be tempted to change “agile testing” to “holistic testing”, as the latter encompasses the approach much more accurately.
Janet is still writing books with Selena Delesie, about their Quality Practices Assessment Model . Will we ever write another book together? We’ve learned to never say never. Whatever we decide, we will keep writing newsletters, our blog posts, and recording our video chats!
