More and more teams start adapting agile software development methodologies such as Scrum, Extreme Programming (XP) or simply adapt various best practices and agile methods that make sense for their specific projects. While agile methods have become popular for development teams, many QA teams and software testers are still hesitant to adjust their practices, processes and even tools to fit into this picture.
Agile testing (and software testing in general) comes with many challenges, involves experimenting and trying new ideas. It's easy to lose sight of the overall goal: building and delivering high quality software. Many agile software development teams found a mix of different approaches most useful, including automated testing, exploratory testing as well as limited manual & functional testing. This page links to useful tools, books and online resources to get started with testing in an agile environment.
Testers and developers who work on agile projects can benefit from various tools to manage testing sessions and to make it easier to create and submit bug reports. In addition to specialized tools for agile testing, agile teams can also benefit from test automation and test management tools so make sure to review these tools as well.
BugDigger can be used during testing to create and submit bug reports to many popular bug tracking and project management tools such as JIRA, FogBugz and Pivotal Tracker. In addition to taking screenshots of the system under test, BugDigger automatically adds additional context and environment information to bug reports.
Bug Shooting is another tool that helps you create and submit bug reports. Bug Shooting integrates with many bug tracking tools and as it allows you to submit bugs via email and command line scripts as well, you can even integrate it with custom in-house solutions.
qTrace is a screen capturing tool that allows you to annotate screenshots, directly enter steps to reproduce issues and submit bug reports to your favorite bug and issue tracking tools.
Snagit is a popular screenshot capturing tool that provides powerful tools to edit, annotate and share screenshots. It can also be used to directly submit and push screenshots as bug reports to tools such as FogBugz.
Bonfire is an agile testing add-on for JIRA, Atlassian's issue and project management tool. Bonfire allows you to make screenshots of the web application under test for bug reports and lets you manage testing sessions inside JIRA.
Usersnap allows testers as well as end-users to generate useful bug reports for your website or web application. Usersnap can be integrated with your favorite bug and project management tool such as OnTime or JIRA to submit bug reports automatically.
The following books provide a good starting point to learn more about agile testing, testing in scrum projects and generally improving (and adjusting) the testing process for modern software development methodologies.
In Agile Testing, Crispin and Gregory define agile testing and illustrate the tester’s role with examples from real agile teams. They teach you how to use the agile testing quadrants to identify what testing is needed, who should do it, and what tools might help. The book chronicles an agile software development iteration from the viewpoint of a tester and explains the seven key success factors of agile testing.
Specification by Example is a collaborative method for specifying requirements and tests. Seven patterns, fully explored in this book, are key to making the method effective. The method has four main benefits: it produces living, reliable documentation; it defines expectations clearly and makes validation efficient; it reduces rework; and, above all, it assures delivery teams and business stakeholders that the software that's built is right for its purpose.
The Art of Agile Development contains practical guidance for anyone considering or applying agile development for building valuable software. Plenty of books describe what agile development is or why it helps software projects succeed, but very few combine information for developers, managers, testers, and customers into a single package that they can apply directly.
The world's leading software testing experts lend you their wisdom and years of experience to help you avoid the most common mistakes in testing software. Each lesson is an assertion related to software testing, followed by an explanation or example that shows you the how, when, and why of the testing lesson.
The world's leading software testing experts lend you their wisdom and years of experience to help you avoid the most common mistakes in testing software. Each lesson is an assertion related to software testing, followed by an explanation or example that shows you the how, when, and why of the testing lesson.
In addition to the above mentioned books, there's a huge number of online resources to help you get started with agile testing, testing in Scrum and Extreme Programming projects and related best practices. We researched the best articles and online resources and please see the list of links below for our findings.
"In a Scrum team, everyone is responsible for testing. Quality is no longer an afterthought and testing should become an inherent part of every stage of the user story development even before a single line of functional code is written. The transition to Scrum should feel like an exciting rebirth for the tester. Removing the manual testing shackles offers the Scrum tester an opportunity to focus on what they do best – design, consulting, and exploratory testing. They are finally given an opportunity to flex their unique skill-set in far more interesting ways."
"In this article, I will be talking about how agile testing is different from normal traditional testing methodology. To do this, let us look at a simple definition of Agile Testing and the principles behind the Agile Testing."
"We like to say that agile developers are "quality infected" and in many ways that's true. Agilists, at least disciplined ones, strive to validate their work to the best of their ability. As a result they are finding ways to bring testing and quality assurance techniques into their work practices as much as possible. This article overviews the techniques and philosophies which disciplined agile developers are applying in practice, putting them into the context of the agile software development lifecycle."
"So if you are trying to make a traditional, heavyweight, record-and-playback test automation solution work in an Agile context, or if you are trying to help those other people understand why their efforts are almost certainly doomed to fail, this post is for you."
In this presentation Stephen Ritchie is explaining various concepts about agile testing and provides useful tips and best practices based on his experience with agile testing projects.
Agile testing is a software testing practice that follows the principles of agile software development. Agile testing involves all members of a cross-functional agile team, with special expertise contributed by testers, to ensure delivering the business value desired by the customer at frequent intervals, working at a sustainable pace.