Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams

Foreword by Brian Marick

Imagine yourself skimming over a landscape thousands of years ago, looking at the people below. They’re barely scraping out a living in a hostile territory, doing some hunting, some fishing, and a little planting. Off in the distance, you see the glitter of a glacier. Moving closer, you see that it’s melting fast and that it’s barely damming a huge lake. As you watch, the lake breaks through, sweeping down a riverbed, carving it deeper, splashing up against cliffs on the far side of the landscape—some of which collapse.

As you watch, the dazed inhabitants begin to explore the opening. On the other side, there’s a lush landscape, teaming with bigger animals than they’ve ever seen before, some grazing on grass with huge seed heads, some squabbling over mounds of fallen fruit.

People move in. Almost immediately, they begin to live better. But as the years fly past, you see them adapt. They begin to use nets to fish in the fast-running streams. They learn the teamwork needed to bring down the larger animals, though not without a few deaths along the way. They find ever-better ways to cultivate this new grass they’ve come to call “wheat.”

As you watch, the mad burst of innovation gives way to a stable solution, a good way to live in this new land, a way that’s taught to each new generation. Although just over there, you spy someone inventing the wheel ...

In the early years of this century, the adoption of Agile methods sometimes seemed like a vast dam breaking, opening up a way to a better—more productive, more joyful—way of developing software. Many early adopters saw benefits right away, even though they barely knew what they were doing.

Some had an easier time of it than others. Programmers were like the hunters in the fable above. Yes, they had to learn new skills in order to hunt bison, but they knew how to hunt rabbits, more or less, and there were plenty of rabbits around. Testers were more like spear-fishers in a land where spear-fishing wouldn’t work. Going from spear-fishing to net-fishing is a much bigger conceptual jump than going from rabbit to bison. And, while some of the skills—cleaning fish, for example—were the same in the new land, the testers had to invent new skills of net-weaving before they could truly pull their weight.

So testing lagged behind. Fortunately, we had early adopters like Lisa and Janet, people who dove right in alongside the programmers, testers who were not jealous of their role or their independence, downright pleasant people who could figure out the biggest change of all in Agile testing: the tester’s new social role.

As a result, we have this book. It’s the stable solution, the good way for testers to live in this new Agile land of ours. It’s not the final word—we could use the wheel, and I myself am eager for someone to invent antibiotics—but what’s taught here will serve you well until someone, perhaps Lisa and Janet, brings the next big change.