Agile Testing
Narendra Parihar
Microsoft
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Agenda
- What’s Agile, and need?
- Challenges in testing agile projects
- Case Study
- Proposed …Testing Approach @Agile
- 3 Key Learnings
- Q&A
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What’s Agile, and need?
Agile means:-
- Notice changes early
- Initiate action promptly
- Have a feasible plan to accommodate changes
- Flexibility to replan, rework, and ready to change all the
time
Agile software development is a conceptual framework for
software engineering that promotes development iterations
throughout the life-cycle of the project
Agile testing involves testing from the customer perspective as early
as possible, testing early and often as code becomes available and
stable enough from module/unit level testing.
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What’s Agile, and need? Cont….
Some of the well-known agile software development methods:
 Extreme Programming (XP)
 Scrum
 Agile Modeling
 Adaptive Software Development (ASD)
 Crystal Clear and Other Crystal Methodologies
 Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM)
 Feature Driven Development (FDD)
 Lean software development
 Agile Unified Process (AUP)
 Essential Unified Process (EssUP)
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What’s Agile, and need? Cont….
Why we need Agile?
- Cycle time to react to customer requirements is less
- Complex requirements
- International competition to GO LIVE
- New Business Opportunities need exploration of new
concepts
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My experience using Agile
Worked before on an Agile application
SCRUM model
Daily Scrum meeting with SCRUM master
Testing in Agile project was a challenge…slowly turned into FUN

Test team to own not only black box but white box, deployment
in SOA architecture, and build process/automation
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Challenges in testing agile projects
Normal testing and Agile Testing are different
People don’t understand difference in normal SDLC/Agile

Reluctant to re-work

Reluctant to re-plan

Not seeing the bigger picture

Coder-Test are a must for effective testing

Integration Testing

Test case design (Yes, not easy here  )

White Box & Build process

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Case study
Expectations from team
Very basic of Agile is to have development at Fast
pace…
Handle the large application in smaller bricks
Adapt to frequently changing requirements
Dev and Test teams work closer than in any other SDLC
model
Coder-Tester role required in QA team
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Case study cont….
Challenges we had in project:-
Requirements were changing on daily basis and this could
have affected the whole product so we decided to go for
Agile method
End date to deliver the project was fixed
Customer wanted to be part of the development closely
Budget was not a constraint here but delivering lot of
functionality within fixed deadline was a challenge
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Case study cont….
How we handled those challenges:-
SCRUM meetings, Breakdown work
to 8 hours, module-level teams,
Integration points discussed very
early while design
Coder-Testers only as Part of the
Testing team, three phase test life
cycle approach
Customer and BA to work closely
with dev/test team through meetings,
walkthrough, demos,
Burndown chart
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Case Study cont…
Everyone to tell status of his 8 hours work done y’day, roadblocks,
learning's in daily SCRUM meeting...meeting documented by SCRUM
master
Daily SCRUM to be completed within 15 mins… no decisions or
solutions to roadblocks discussed in SCRUM meetings
3 teams within testing team:
White Box test team – (Build Automation using Cruise control and
Yahoo widgets, Code review, coverage, writing Junits, and Agitation)
Acceptance test team –(Writing acceptance fixtures and UI test)
System Testing team
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Testing Approach @Agile
White
-Box
Code review, Junit Tests, Agitation, Automated
WB Test Builds
Team
Gray-
Box
Acceptance Acceptance Fixtures, and Functional Automation
Test Team
Black-
Box
System Test System and Integration Test
Team
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Case Study cont..
 Automated test cases generation and test scenarios using Use-case
based technique and CTE tool (Time to write test cases was short
like 40-50 hours in every iteration)
 Automation was the MANTRA for testing team … in every testing
activity.. Automate pages as and when released by dev team
 Understanding the BIG picture while testing was the key
 Buddy Testing… very effective.. After all our goal is to make world-
class product not the heaps of defects 
 Work closely with Dev team.. Till they get fixed
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Conclusions
What are the # key learning?
 Testing in Agile process needs Coder-Testers profile
 Ready to accommodate changes is the key
 Agile gives you production ready code at end of every
sprint… Business may decide to go live with it any time

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Q & A
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