Tuesday 13 January 2009

testing and Agile

One of the problems regarding how to test in an agile development team is the area of system integration and I include performance testing as well. It is all well and good getting the designers to write tests for their pieces of work, but who can write the tests that cover those units being integrated into a working whole?
The plan we have come up with, and one that seems to work reasonably well is to have the integration testing done "one sprint behind" the development work. Of course, it is mostly automated scripts so that regression testing can be performed easily.
The difficulty of writing tests whilst the code is being developed can best be seen when trying to test user interfaces. It is quite possible that the position of buttons, selection lists and text areas changes whilst the program is being worked on, so writing tests that check for the operation of those items is best left until the work is done.

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