30 Days of Agile testing, Day 2: Mindmap of what agile testing is

For Day 2 of 30 days of agile testing I looked at this guest post from Jess Ingrasselino. I also looked at the MindMap of manual testing in an agile environment by Matt Archer. I struggle with mindmaps as a form of communication so I prefer the list format under it myself.

For me, agile testing is much less siloed than previous “schools” of testing at a high level.

I struggle to articulate what I think agile testing is at a lower level. I feel that agile testing is one role that helps to unite all of the other roles across a team. I need to work with our UX developer to understand why the designs are the way they are. I need to understand our target market and what they might want from our product. I need to work with our developers to ensure that they understand all of this too.

Of course, with testing you need to ask a lot of questions:

  1. What is the risk of this? (to the business, the user, the other stakeholders)
  2. Why are we doing this? (the feature, the test, using a tool)
  3. Who is this for? (the product, the documentation, the automation)

I don’t think those questions change from agile to non agile environments but I think the speed that the answers for them are needed changes.

On the Dojo there are pages of resources for agile testing that I don’t think I’ll get through before the end of the challenge. I’m hoping that one of these pages helps me to get together a more detailed explanation of what agile testing is.

In the meantime does anyone have a better explanation of what agile testing is?

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Janet Gregory and I asked the testing & agile communities to help us define agile testing. We’d never thought of doing a shorter definition - we tend to write hundreds of pages about it, with a lot of help from our friends! Here is the definition we came up with, with a lot of input from others:

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“agile testing”

so testing here is a gerund - a verb used as a noun. - and agile, an adjective. I find this interesting as well as a bit confusing.

Testing is inherently a cognitive activity so to attach the adjective agile to it is in the first instance a little strange…that is, in terms of thinking of it as (a) a way of testing or (b) testing technique or © as a particular approach to testing. I think of adding this adjective in this case as describing testing being done in the particular context of the agile process.
(I expect that I am now sounding pedantic…apologies…)

So to me this means things such as:

  • executing testing activities throughout the sprint - such as backlog grooming(testing the integrity of the ino on user stories)

  • testing done by folks right across team(dev, PO, testers testing the application)

  • testers involved in a diverse range of fast-paced conversations and feedback loops.

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Day2: Writing article about agile testing from experiment.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/testdev-collaboration-experience-agile-testing-mj-alavi

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I added my feedback against my blog :slight_smile:

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Some blog posts I found shared on Twitter for todays challenge

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Here is my mindmap for day 2 challenge.