Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Cohn))

Agile teams are best suited for organizations that allow independent thinking. For example, if a company has a hierarchical structure and encourages a directive management style for all its projects, agile teams will probably struggle.

Testers work closely with customers to learn requirements and define acceptance tests that will prove that conditions of satisfaction are met.

Some people saw testers as failed programmers or second-class citizens in the world of software development. Testers who don’t bother to learn new skills and grow professionally contribute to the perception that testing is low-skilled work. Even the term “tester” has been avoided, with job titles such as “Quality Assurance Engineer” or “Quality Ana

Testers who have been working in a traditional setting might have a hard time adjusting to their new roles and activities.

Automated testing is one key to the solution. One thing we know for sure: No agile team will succeed doing only manual testing. We need robust automation in order to deliver business value in a time frame that makes it valuable.

Even if the customer is internal, it can feel more like two separate companies than two teams working on a common goal of producing business value. Agile development depends on close involvement from customers or, at the very least, their proxies. Agile teams have invited customers to collaborate, work in the same locations if possible, and be inti

For example, a skilled exploratory tester may discover issues in the system that couldn’t be detected by automated functional tests. Someone with deep testing experience might ask important questions that didn’t occur to team members without testing experience. Testing knowledge is one component of any team’s ability to deliver value.

Automating tests is hard, but it is much easier when you have the whole team working together. Any testing issue is easier to address when you have people with multiple skill sets and multiple perspectives attacking it.

When an organization lacks an overall quality philosophy and pressures teams to get the product out without regard to quality, testers feel the pinch. A team that tries to use agile development in such an environment faces an uphill battle.