You’ve “gone agile” and have been relatively successful. So, how do you know how well your test team is really doing? And how do you continuously improve your test practices? When things get rocky, how do you handle the challenges without reverting to old habits? The path to high-performance agile testing isn’t easy or quick, and it helps to have a guide. So consider this tutorial your guide to ongoing, improved, and sustained high-performance agile testing. Join Bob Galen and Mary Thorn as they share lessons from their most successful agile testing transitions. Explore actual team case studies for building team skills, embracing agile requirements, fostering customer interaction, building agile test automation, driving business value, and testing at-scale—all building agile testing excellence. Examine the mistakes, adjustments, and successes, and learn how to react to real-world contexts. Leave with a better view of your team’s strengths, weaknesses, and where you need to focus to improve.
Mary Thorn
The director of quality at Ipreo in Raleigh, NC, Mary Thorn has a broad testing background that spans automation, data warehouses, and web-based systems in a wide variety of technologies and testing techniques. During her more than seventeen years of experience in healthcare, HR, financial, and SaaS-based products, Mary has held manager and contributor level positions in software development organizations. A strong leader in agile testing methodologies, she has direct experience leading teams through agile adoption and beyond. Mary is the chief storyteller in the book, The Three Pillars of Agile Quality & Testing.
We’ve all been there. We work incredibly hard to develop a feature and design tests based on written requirements. We build a detailed test plan that aligns the tests with the software and the documented business needs. And when we put the tests to the software, it all falls apart because the requirements were changed without informing everyone. But help is at hand. Enter behavior-driven development (BDD) and Cucumber—a tool for running automated acceptance tests and facilitating BDD. Mary Thorn explores the nuances of Cucumber and shows you how to implement BDD and agile acceptance testing. By fostering collaboration for implementing active requirements via a common language and format, Cucumber bridges the communication gap between business stakeholders and implementation teams. If you experience developers not coding to requirements, testers not getting requirements updates, or customers who feel out of the loop and don’t get what they ask for, Mary has answers for you.