Agile Testing – Teaming up

Interesting things happen when you start using Test Driven Development. One revelation is that TDD isn't just about discovering bugs:

"The act of writing a unit test is more an act of design than of verification." (Bob Martin)

As I previously wrote, a first step towards agile customer testing is bringing your testers into the team. A second step is to encourage your testers to team up with programmers and work together on the development of features.

As we have brought testers into our team and encouraged them to team up with programmers we have also seen benefits that aren't just limited to finding bugs.

To paraphrase Uncle Bob:

The act of writing a customer test is more an act of process improvement than of verification.

So what are these process improvements? Here are a handful we have experienced:

• Stories get broken down into smaller stories that allow the testers to get testing early

• Customer tests define the features of the product, eliminating the need for many of the documents traditionally associated with testing

• There is no need for a separate acceptance activity – when the programmers have completed the feature the customer tester has completed their testing

• Programmers get involved in, and a better understanding of customer testing (and vice versa).

I'm sure we will discover more benefits as we get better at customer testing.