Lisa Crispin, Fast401k Inc.

Lisa Crispin is the co-author, with Tip House, of Testing Extreme Programming (Addison-Wesley, 2002). She has worked as a tester on agile (and not-so-agile) teams since 2000, using Extreme Programming and Scrum practices. She has more than 10 years experience in test automation and quality assurance. She has presented tutorials and workshops on agile testing at many international agile development and testing/QA conferences in the U.S. and Europe.

Her articles on agile testing have appeared in publications such as STQE Magazine, Methods and Tools, Agile Times, and Novatica. Her papers "Testing in the Fast Lane: Acceptance Test Automation in an Extreme Programming Environment" and "Is Quality Negotiable?" are included in Extreme Programming Perspectives (Addison-Wesley, 2002).

When she's not testing, Lisa can be found enjoying dressage with her equine partner Dodger, or driving Ernest, the miniature donkey. Lisa can be contacted at lisa.crispin@att.net. Her website is: http://lisa.crispin.home.att.net.

Track:   Test-Driven Development

Abstract:

Development teams have many tools available to help them deliver better business value to their clients. Most of us accept that unit testing produce higher-quality code. More teams are using test-driven development to improve both design and quality. What can developers gain from working with testers and business experts? How can developers get their business clients involved in their projects? How can a tester, along with the "customer team", help drive development through "customer" (or "acceptance") tests, and why would you want to do that?

In this talk, Lisa will share her experiences in helping to drive development with customer tests. A new breed of test tools allow testers and business experts to define tests even before code is written. They collaborate with the programmers to automate the tests, giving the programmers deeper insight into the business requirements and helping clients to get the best technical solution. Testing from both the programmer (e.g. unit) and customer (e.g. acceptance) perspective before and during coding ensures that the code meets the level of quality required by the clients.

Agile software development has been compared to driving a car. You can't plan everything about your trip in advance; you don't know what traffic jams are in your way, you may not even be sure where your trip should end. Instead of trying to plan every detail in advance, you start your journey and make small corrections to stay on track. Testers act as the navigators that help developers and their clients happily reach their destination.

Track:   Test-Driven Development

Track:   Tutorials

Abstract:

Summary

This tutorial shows testers, or anyone wearing the tester hat on a software development team using agile practices, how testers contribute to the project, including what testers can do, when they should do it, and how they should do it. You'll do exercises that show you how to either work on an agile team as a tester yourself, or work productively with a tester on your team.

Audience:

Testers, programmers, coaches, customers, analysts and managers. Anyone who might be expected to help with some aspect of testing on an agile team, anyone who wants to learn what "agile testing" can be, and anyone who wants to help their team maintain a focus on quality.

Description:

There are a plethora of agile processes being practiced: Extreme Programming, SCRUM, Crystal, FDD, DSDM, and others. It's not always clear how a tester fits in to these new software development methods. Even if your organization isn't using agile methods to develop software, you can benefit from using an agile approach to testing. For the tutorial we'll use XP as an example, but the lessons learned apply to other agile processes. We'll go through an iteration of an XP project step by step and show what goals to reach for, which activities to engage in, and some helpful techniques for testers to use. The exercises are built around an XP project to develop a simple web-based tracking application. We'll examine the techniques we use and see how they could apply in a non-agile setting.

Tutorial Outline:

1) What testers do during release planning and story writing:

a. How to identify hidden, questionable and incorrect assumptions

b. How to define acceptance tests to make assumptions explicit

c. How to accurately estimate time for acceptance test tasks

d. How to enable accurate story estimates

e. How to ask questions to identify potential problems

2) What testers do during iteration planning

a. How to help the team think of all tasks needed to complete a story, including those relating to infrastructure, packaging, environment, functional and acceptance testing

b. How to promote understanding between the customers and the development team

c. How to break out and accurately estimate tasks related to acceptance testing

3) What testers do during the actual iteration

a. How you can drive development with acceptance tests

b. How your team can define detailed, but not too detailed, and effective acceptance tests, accounting for unusual and external events as appropriate

c. How to work together with the business experts to produce tests

d. How to choose tools appropriate to the testing tasks at hand