Agile teams must deliver production-ready software at the end of every one to four week iteration – or even possibly every day. This goal can’t be achieved without automated tests, and many teams struggle with test automation. The challenge of automating all regression tests frightens many testers, who feel their skills aren’t up to the job. How do we deliver good quality when we have to release so often?
By combining a collaborative team approach with appropriate tools and design approaches, over time you can automate regression tests and use automation to enhance exploratory testing. In this interactive tutorial, Lisa Crispin describes what tests should be automated, some common barriers to test automation, and ways to overcome those barriers. Through demos, you’ll learn how to design automated tests for maximum effectiveness and ease of maintenance. You’ll find out different approaches for evaluating and implementing automated test tools, shortening feedback cycles, creating realistic test data, and evaluating your automation efforts. You’ll understand how to fit automation activities within each iteration so testing “keeps up” with coding.
Group exercises and discussions will help you understand new skills and practices, as well as learn from other participants’ experiences.
Lisa Crispin is an agile testing coach and practitioner. She is the co-author, with Janet Gregory, of Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams (Addison-Wesley, 2009). She specializes in showing testers and agile teams how testers can add value and how to guide development with business-facing tests. Her mission is to bring agile joy to the software testing world and testing joy to the agile development world. Lisa joined her first agile team in 2000, having enjoyed many years working as a programmer, analyst, tester, and QA director.
Since 2003, she’s been a tester on a Scrum/XP team at ePlan Services, Inc. in Denver, Colorado. She frequently leads tutorials and workshops on agile testing at conferences in North America and Europe. Lisa regularly contributes articles about agile testing to publications such as Better Software Magazine, IEEE Software, and Methods and Tools. Lisa also co-authored Testing Extreme Programming (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2002) with Tip House.