Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory

Agile Testing: The Book

Our book is available at Amazon and other fine bookstores. Please review it on Amazon. It's now in its 6th printing. Thanks to everyone who has given us so much great feedback!

Chapters available online:

Chapter 1 - What is Agile Testing Anyway?

Chapter 21 - Key Success Factors for Agile Testing

Agile Testing Training Course - based on the book

We've developed a three-day course based on the book and on our extensive experiences working on and helping agile teams. We've taught this course all around the globe. Attend a public course, or have us do a private on-site one customized to your needs. Here's more information on the course and how to register.

More About the Authors

Wee're available (individually and as a team) for coaching, training and mentoring of agile testers and teams. Please contact us for more information on how we can help your testers transition to agile development, and help your agile team succeed with testing. Also, please contact us for up-to-date information about automated test tools that we can recommend.
www.janetgregory.ca - janet@agiletester.ca

www.lisacrispin.com - lisa@agiletester.ca

More about the book:

The mind map on the download page gives an overview of the contents.

Overview:

This practical book is for testers who find themselves on an agile team, test and quality assurance managers in organizations transitioning to agile development, and agile teams learning how to approach testing.

The book starts with an introduction to agile testing, how it's different from testing on a traditional team, and what makes agile testers different. The book contains dozens of stories from real people on real agile teams about the various testing-related issues they faced and how they resolved them.

A section on organizational challenges covers cultural issues that agile testers face, team logistics, metrics, defect tracking and test planning.

One central part of the book uses Brian Marick's agile testing matrix to go through all the different types of testing needed on an agile project, who does it, how to approach each type, and what tools might help.

The test automation portion of the book looks at barriers to successful test automation, ways to overcome them, and how to develop a sound test automation strategy.

Another core section of the book takes the reader through an iteration, and more, in the life of an agile testing, from release planning to successful delivery.

In the book, we answer questions such as:

- As a tester, what is my role on an agile team?

- How do I transition from a traditional phased/gated development cycle to agile?

- How do we get testers engaged with the rest of the agile development team?

- What tools do I need?

- Who does what testing on an agile team?

- How can testing "keep up" with short iterations?

- How do we know if we're doing a good job of testing? How can we improve?

- What do testers do the first few days of an iteration, before any stories are done?

- None of our testing is automated. Where do we start, and how do we find time to do automation?

This book teaches by example. It presents many testing challenges faced by real agile teams, including the authors', and explains how those teams solved their problems. You'll learn how apply different types of agile testing to your unique situation in order to guide development, learn about the product and apply that learning to the development and testing process.

Agile Testing: The Training Course

Our three-day Agile Testing course explains how testers can become valued agile team members, how they contribute to frequent delivery of business value, and how they can overcome common obstacles in transitioning to agile development. Students will learn techniques such as acceptance test-driven-development (ATDD) and the Whole Team approach that enable testing to "keep up" with coding in agile iterations. For more information, please see http://janetgregory.ca/training.htm

Typos and Errors in Book

We know our readers are testers, so you're bound to find all the errors we missed! Please email us with any errors or typos you find in the book.

Click the "Errata" link at left to see the known errors in the book. They'll be fixed in the next printing. Thank you!

Thanks to Our Contributors

Thanks to everyone who contributed their experiences to the book, and everyone who reviewed draft chapters and made so many excellent suggestions.

Thanks to you, we think this book will help lots of agile newbies and teams struggling with testing.
Happy Testing!