More Keys to Effective Agile Testing
Learn other key factors for effective Agile testing.
We'll cover the following...
- Ensure developers take primary responsibility for testing their own code
- Measure code coverage
- Beware of abuse of test coverage measures
- Monitor static code metrics
- Write test code with care
- Prioritize maintaining the test suites
- Have the separate test organization create and maintain acceptance tests
- Keep unit tests in perspective
Aside from including testers on the development teams and using automated tests, keep in mind the following keys to effective Agile testing.
Ensure developers take primary responsibility for testing their own code
Integrating testers into development teams can have the unintended consequence of developers not testing their code—the opposite of what is intended! Developers have primary responsibility for quality of their work, including testing. Beware of these warning signs:
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Backlog items are closed only toward the end of each sprint (this implies that testing is occurring after coding, and separately).
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Developers move to other coding tasks before driving previous tasks to the DoD.
Measure code coverage
Writing test cases before writing the code (“test-first”) can be a useful discipline, but we’ve found that, for new code bases, code-coverage measurement of unit tests ...