Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams полностью

Another thing to double-check before the iteration is whether your team has all the resources you need to complete any high-risk stories. Do you need any experts who are shared with other projects? For example, you may need a security expert if one of the stories poses a security risk or is for a security feature. If load testing will be done, you may need to have a special tool, or have help from a load testing specialist from another team, or even a vendor who provides load testing services. This is your last chance to plan ahead.

Summary

Your team may or may not need to do any preparation in advance of an iteration. Because priorities change fast in agile development, you don’t want to waste time planning stories that may be postponed. However, if you’re about to implement some new technology, embark on a complex new theme, hope to save time in iteration planning, or your team is divided into different locations, you might find some up-front planning and research to be productive. As a tester, you can do the following:

Help the customers achieve “advance clarity”—consensus on the desired behavior of each story—by asking questions and getting examples.

Be proactive, learn about complex stories in advance of the iteration, and make sure they’re sized correctly.

You don’t always need advance preparation to be able to hit the ground running in the next iteration. Don’t do any preparation that doesn’t save time during the iteration or ensure more success at meeting customer requirements.

Coordinate between different locations and facilitate communication. There are many tools to help with this.

Obtain examples to help illustrate each story.

Develop test strategies in advance of the next iteration for new and unusual features.

Triage and prioritize existing defects to determine whether any should be scheduled for the next iteration.

Determine whether any necessary testing resources not currently at hand need to be lined up for the next iteration.

Chapter 17 Iteration Kickoff

Agile testers play an essential role during iteration planning, helping to plan testing and development tasks. As the iteration gets under way, testers actively collaborate with customers and developers, writing the high-level tests that help guide development, eliciting and illustrating examples, making sure stories are testable. Let’s take a closer look at the agile tester’s activities at the beginning of each iteration.

Iteration Planning

Most teams kick off their new iteration with a planning session. This might be preceded by a retrospective, or “lessons learned” session, to look back to see what worked well and what didn’t in the previous iteration. Although the retrospective’s action items or “start, stop, continue” suggestions will affect the iteration that’s about to start, we’ll talk about the retrospective as an end-of-iteration activity in Chapter 19, “Wrap Up the Iteration.”

While planning the work for the iteration, the development team discusses one story at a time, writing and estimating all of the tasks needed to implement that story. If you’ve done some work ahead of time to prepare for the iteration, this planning session will likely go fairly quickly.

Teams new to agile development often need a lot of time for their iteration planning sessions. Iteration planning often took a whole day when Lisa’s team first started out. Now they are done in two or three hours, which includes time for the retrospective. Lisa’s team uses a projector to display user acceptance test cases and conditions of satisfaction from their wiki so that everyone on the team can see them. They also project their online story board tool, where they write the task cards. Another traditional component of their planning meetings is a plate of treats that they take turns providing. Figure 17-1 shows an iteration planning meeting in progress.

Figure 17-1 Iteration planning meeting. Used with permission of Mike Thomas. Copyright 2008.

Learning the Details