Enabling Agile Testing through Continuous Integration
Add to calendarA Continuous Integration system is often considered one of the key elements involved in supporting an agile software development and testing environment. As a traditional software tester transitioning to agile environment, it became clear that we would needed several changes to make the transition to agile testing possible. This experience report discusses a continuous integration implementation I led last year. The initial motivations, technical specifics of the implementation, perceived benefits to the team, and retrospective results are all discussed.
My main approach (via PowerPoint slides) is to convey my experience implementing agile testing with support from a continuous integration system. I will present the problems my team was initially faced with and describe how we solved it. I will then go into a bit more detail about how we implemented a continuous integration system (so they can take it from an abstract idea into a nuts and bolts concept). Then I’ll describe how our implementation was a benefit to our team and how it helped us solve our problems by enabling testing in parallel with development. Finally I share with them a retrospective of some key points I’ve learned in the process.
Outline of my talk and paper:
- Introduction
- The Problem
- The Solution
- What is Continuous Integration?
- Continuous Integration Implementation
5.1. Layout
5.2. Software Tools Used
5.3. Tool Mapping
5.4. Putting it all together - Assessing the Team’s Continuous Integration Practices
- Assessing our new Agile Testing Practices and Agile Testing Capabilities
- Retrospective
- References
NOTE: The presentation included below (ContinuousIntegratedBuildSystem.pdf) will be updated to more closely mirror my latest paper on this topic (also attached as EnablingAgileTestingwithContinuousIntegration.pdf). I plan on removing a lot of the “what’s agile development?” boiler plate from the presentation attached and update to include latest info from my paper. The paper is targeted at Agile Testing while the presentation is loosely so.
- Agile development practices that enable agile testing
- What a continuous integration system looks like
- Martin Fowler’s “Continuous Integration Practices”
- How a continuous integration system enables agile testing practices
- Possible benefits from implementing agile testing with continuous integration
