Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams

by Lisa Crispin

Agile testers stay focused on the big picture. We can deliver the most critical functionality in this iteration and add to it later.

Retrospectives are a key agile practice that lets the team use yesterday’s experience to do a better job tomorrow.

Agile team members should feel safe and not have to worry about being blamed for mistakes or losing their jobs.

During story estimating and planning sessions, agile testers look at each feature from multiple perspectives: business, end user, production support,

They raise questions that flush out assumptions made by the customer and developer teams. At the start of each iteration, they help to make sure the customer provides clear requirements and examples, and they help the development team turn those into tests.

Ward Cunningham coined the term “technical debt” in 1992, but we’ve certainly experienced it throughout our careers in software development! Technical debt builds up when the development team takes shortcuts, hacks in quick fixes, or skips writing or automating tests because it’s under the gun.