Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams

How We Wrote This Book

Having experienced the benefits of agile development, we used agile practices to produce this book. As we began work on the book, we talked to agile testers and teams from around the globe to find out what problems they encountered and how they addressed them. We planned how we would cover these areas in the book.

We made a release plan based on two-week iterations. Every two weeks, we delivered two rough-draft chapters to our book website. Because we aren’t co-located, we found tools to use to communicate, provide “source code control” for our chapters, deliver the product to our customers, and get their feedback. We couldn’t “pair” much real-time, but we traded chapters back and forth for review and revision, and had informal “stand-ups” daily via instant message.

Our “customers” were the generous people in the agile community who volunteered to review draft chapters. They provided feedback by email or (if we were lucky) in person. We used the feedback to guide us as we continued writing and revising. After all the rough drafts were done, we made a new plan to complete the revisions, incorporating all the helpful ideas from our “customers.”

Our most important tool was mind maps. We started out by creating a mind map of how we envisioned the whole book. We then created mind maps for each section of the book. Before writing each chapter, we brainstormed with a mind map. As we revised, we revisited the mind maps, which helped us think of ideas we may have missed.

Because we think the mind maps added so much value, we’ve included the mind map as part of the opening of each chapter. We hope they’ll help you get an overview of all the information included in the chapter, and inspire you to try using mind maps yourself.