Agile Testing with Lisa Crispin

There’s so much swirling around in my brain from a whole week in Chicago at Agile 2009. Let me start with my recollections of the Agile Alliance Functional Test Tools workshop. Jennitta Andrea chairs this effort, and Elisabeth Hendrickson facilitated this meeting.

The facility was great, plenty of room and good connectivity, and had a nice view of the Sears (Willis) Tower and a sliver of lake!

The workshop was all Open Space, so we started out by planning the sessions. 3 timeslots, 4 locations, though there ended up being only 11 sessions. One of the first sessions was lightning talk demos of various tools – Canoo WebTest, Twist, Cucumber, Robot Framework and SWAT. (Not to say that Watir and Selenium were ignored – we were just already familiar with those). I was impressed by Robot Framework, an open source tool whose developer is Pekka Klark. It has a lot of flexibility. It uses a tabular format similar to FitNesse except there is only one type of table. You can do keyword driven, data driven and even BDD style tests. It also takes command line arguments. It lets you have internal and external libraries such as Swing.

Mike Longin (who works for the same company I do) did a great job demo-ing both SWAT and UltiFit (the latter is not open source, but as there was interest in it, Mike may undertake that task). There was a lot of interest in SWAT, nobody had seen it before and I think they were particularly impressed by the IDE.

One of the other morning sessions was how to get Cucumber to work with .Net. Of course you can run Cucumber tests on the browser no matter what your app language, but if you want to test in the same process as your app code, you need some bridge. After a lot of discussion of things like Iron Ruby, someone had the idea to use the Slim protocol between Cucumber and .Net. Aslak Hellesoy, the Cucumber developer, thinks this idea may have legs. I have some photos of the diagrams they drew and will upload them here when I get time.

Paul King, one of the WebTest contributors as well as the main Groovy developer, proposed doing more mixing and matching of testing frameworks/drivers/utilities/tools. He had a nice graphic showing what is available. We all agreed there are enough test runners, and the developer community should focus on solving new problems. Gerard Meszaros created a spreadsheet showing all the tools along with the features and requirements people might have for their test framework/drivers. Some of us got together in an afternoon session to tweak the tools spreadsheet and Gerard posted it on Google docs so that tool developers/users can add to it and fill it out. This is the start of a great resource both for users looking for the right tool to developers who want to know what they might be able to build on or adapt.

The Agile 2009 program is ready, and it’s chock full of practical content. I know training and travel budgets have been cut, but this program is worth the investment. Of course, the best thing about any conference is the informal networking and learning from other participants. This year’s presenters include not only a lot of “big names”, but lots of in-the-trenches practitioners dealing with the same issues as your team.

I’m particularly excited about our testing stage program. Our track is in a large room, so we have included sessions that are highly interactive, and useful for a wide variety of participants. We have a great range of topics and session types. There are also lots of sessions in the Developer Jam and Tools for Agility stages that will be highly interesting for anyone involved in testing.

Check out the Agile 2009 website for information on how to propose sessions. Bob Galen and I, along with a stellar review committee, are looking for practical sessions for all levels of experience to include on the Testing Stage. Whether you’re doing a set of practices such as Scrum, XP, Crystal, or your own flavor of agile, we hope you’ll give back to the agile community by sharing your experiences and ideas. There are lots of interesting stages, in fact you might have a hard time deciding where your agile testing or other topic session belongs. Don’t sweat it, you can work with the stage producers to decide where it fits best.

By submitting now, you’ll have a couple of weeks in which reviewers will give you plenty of feedback, ask questions to help you clarify your proposal, and polish it up. Please submit today!