Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams

Part IV Automation

Test automation is a core agile practice. Agile projects depend on automation. Good-enough automation frees the team to deliver high-quality code frequently. It provides a framework that lets the team maximize its velocity while maintaining a high standard. Source code control, automated builds and test suites, deployment, monitoring, and a variety of scripts and tools eliminate tedium, ensure reliability, and allow the team to do its best work at all times.

Automation is also a vast topic. It includes tasks like writing simple shell scripts, setting up session properties, and creating robust automated tests. The range and number of automated tools seem to grow exponentially as we learn about better ways to produce software. Happily, the number of excellent books that teach ways to automate appears to grow just as fast.

This book is focused on the tester’s role in agile development. Because automation is key to successful agile development, we need to talk about it, but we can’t begin to cover every aspect of the subject. What we do want to explain is why you, as a tester, must embrace automation, and how you and your team can overcome the many obstacles that can hamper your automation efforts. This section describes how you can apply agile values, principles, and practices to grow a practical automation strategy, overcome barriers, and get traction on test automation.