This report will focus on challenges we faced maintaining hundreds of builds that encompass tens of thousands of assertions. Over the past five years our development team, at Iowa Student Loan (ISL), leveraged TDD and Continuous Integration to develop software. Tests and builds quickly accumulate and maintaining them can be like herding cats. We were often tempted to neglect these tests in the pursuit of developing new functionality. We would like to share strategies that helped us maintain our automated test investments.

Why do testers on some agile teams find iterations productive and enjoyable, while other teams struggle to “keep up” with testing and get stories to “done done” within the iteration? Succeeding with agile testing is more than just automating tests or sitting with the developers. To create working software quickly, your whole team must be able to build a shared understanding of a feature - and do this rapidly, accurately, over and over again, every feature, every iteration. This hands-on tutorial teaches you how to use the agile technique of acceptance criteria to build shared understanding.

Different testing approaches are needed because quality has many aspects besides functional requirements, such as making sure the code is reliable and secure. How do you know you’ve done the kinds of testing and quality processes are necessary for your product, especially on an agile project?

The Agile Testing Quadrants help you categorize tests and plan for different testing activities needed over the life of a project. It can be used by the team as a base for this common vocabulary about testing, and as a mechanism to start discussions and encourage collaboration.

In the battle of YAGNI and the performance testers, who wins out on an agile project? Join us as we walk through a historical account of what happens when you need to meet heavy performance targets on an agile project. Find out what was at stake, and the dire consequences if either side annihilated the other. We’ll focus on technical detail, planning and management techniques that led to the only outcome, collaborative success! Finally, discover the impact this battle had in the war agile wages to align the needs of end customers, the business, and IT, to see how it all worked out.

A 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.

A good QA is worth their weight in gold, but the reality is that the best QA often have trouble working in an Agile Environment. The shift to a quality centred approach surely must be every QA’s dream but there are underlying issues that prevent this adoption. In this session we delve into the mind of a career tester, probe the pain points & explore strategies to communicate the value of agile testing to the classically trained. We look at personalities & what drives people to want to test & the benefits that QA provide to a project beyond rubber-stamping the ‘done’ column on the task board.

There is much information available about how to begin automated UI testing projects. There is little information available about how to maintain successful, effective, long-term, large-scale UI testing projects.

Over the course of more than two years, my company Socialtext was able to grow a test automation project from a proof of concept of 400 test steps, run on demand, to nearly 10,000 test steps run automatically 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This talk will cover test design, test architecture, test creation, test maintenance, and the project’s future steps.

In this session, you will learn one thing: how to enable emergent design in a database. The reality is that database development is different from application code development. They are similar, but databases bring about some forces that we haven’t given much thought.

This session challenges traditional, foundational database development techniques and proposes a new framework into which Agile processes, as well as techniques such as TDD or refactoring, can better fit.

In today’s Agile development environment, UI testing is still very much done the old way. We still see long scripts that are easily broken and impossible to maintain. By applying modern software development techniques like test first development, refactoring, and pair programming we can seek to make better tests that are less fragile and more likely to discover defects in code. In this session we will demonstrate the techniques listed above and discuss how they can be applied to UI testing. The demonstration will use a combination of fitnesse and SWAT (an open source web UI testing tool).