Testing
Sponsored by
ePlan Services Inc., and independent testing coach. RGalen ConsultingWelcome to the Testing Stage! If you’re a tester, developer, business analyst, coach, manager, or anyone else with a stake in delivering high-quality software, you’ll find practical information here. The testing stage sessions are highly interactive and designed to give you practical ideas and techniques to use as soon as you get back to work. We want you to share our large agile testing community experience, both in our stage sessions, and in Open Jam sessions. This is an exciting conference for all of us engaged in testing on agile projects, because we have so many forums devoted to testing issues, not only on this stage, but also in the Tools for Agility and Developer Jam stages.
There’s a lot of confusion around testing and agile development. In agile development, programmers write tests - so what do testers do? Is there a place on an agile team for a tester who doesn’t have good technical skills? Do we need other roles such as business or functional analysts if we have testers? Where do traditional testing activities such as user acceptance testing fit in agile iterations? What becomes of QA team managers when a software development organization transitions to agile? Who defines quality on an agile project, what are the different types of testing that need to be done, and who does them? What tools can we use so that our testing “keeps up” with the fast pace of agile development? What skills should we include on our teams?
The Testing Stage provides a venue for participants with questions like these, and presenters with the experience to provide guidance, if not answers. The Testing Stage sessions are designed to help testers and agile teams succeed in defining and delivering high quality software. As test-driven development at the unit level is more focused on design than testing, and covered in the Developer Jam sessions, this stage focuses on types of testing beyond developer tests, such as acceptance, functional, system, end-to-end, usability and other ‘ilities’, performance, stress, load and other business- and technology-facing tests. Topics include:
- Driving development with business-facing examples and acceptance tests
- Agile automation tools for functional and non-functional testing
- Why and how testers and programmers collaborate to deliver business value
- The role of testers on agile teams, the relationship between developer testing and tester testing
- How to engage testers from “traditional” development methodologies and help them transition to agile teams
- Why and how to do exploratory testing on agile projects
- Testing beyond the functional on agile projects - for example, load, performance, security, usability
- Tools to help customers express and clarify requirements, prototypes, mock-ups
- Success stories and lessons learned in testing on agile teams
- Continuous testing: CI, continuous performance testing, automated regression testing and the like
- Managing testers on agile teams
- Testing challenges for distributed teams
Sessions included in this stage include tutorials, workshops, demos, talks and experience reports. Tutorials provide a place for you to learn from the instructors and fellow participants in an interactive setting, doing hands-on exercises and participating in group discussions. Workshops are a venue for generating new ideas to share with the agile community. Demos and talks will introduce you to ways other teams have tackled testing issues and implemented test tools and frameworks, and even these will have a high interactive component. Experience reports are the best way to learn from practitioners “in the trenches” who have dealt with the same problems your team faces.
Test tools, libraries and frameworks are also covered in the Tools for Agility sessions as well as Developer Jam, so be sure to check those stages.
If you don’t see a session on a topic that’s important to you, schedule an Open Jam session on it!
Reviewers
Oracle Corporation Bits and Connections LLC DragonFire Inc. Nokia Siemens Networks Pillar Technology Virtual Genius, LLC. LDS Church emprove Self-employed Valtech freelancer BSKYB BGI, Guidewire ATSC ONION S.P.A. Questcon Technologies EnvisionWare, Inc. Cyrus Innovation