Agile Testing with Lisa Crispin

Agile Coaching, in my opinion, isn’t only for people who coach agile teams. If you’re in the software business, you’ll learn something valuable from this book. Start with the last chapter – “Growing You”. The only way to succeed in our industry is to continually learn and improve, and this chapter gives great suggestions how to do that.

This book is a model of concise, clear writing. It’s packed with information in the form of narrative, bullet points, graphics, photos, stories of real teams and projects, exercises, tips and examples. The authors have been walking their talk for a long time, so you can feel confident about following their advice. Their flair for language makes the book fun to read. It could be a quick read, except you’ll find yourself stopping to reflect on your own experiences, and thinking about how you could apply the technique you just read about on your own team. Each chapter includes hurdles you may face, and a checklist summarizing action items for you, the reader.

I particularly enjoyed the little vignettes with dialog from a typical team illustrating topics such as “Not Quite Done Yet” and “Getting Ready to Demo”. The authors have insight into all aspects of coding, testing, and managing software teams. You’ll find advice you might not expect in a software-related book, such as “Be kind to yourself”. The focus on people and teams will make you a better person and team member.

I just reviewed a book proposal that raised my ire. The skills and techniques that would be taught in the book were fine. The emphasis on context-driven testing was great. But the book appeared to be framed in a setting where testing is all about dealing with crises, trying to figure what testing you can squeeze in to a very short timeframe, making the testers somehow in charge of quality.

Testing skills are important, of course, and we testers add value with our special experience and viewpoint. But we can’t have much impact on quality by ourselves.

On the plus side, I’m seeing more and more teams around the world figure out that the best way to deliver a high-quality product is to move testing to the front, make testing and coding part of one process, have the whole development team take responsibility for quality, and work incrementally, iteratively and at a sustainable pace.

On the minus side, I see things like this book proposal that ignore the evidence of how this new whole-team approach is working, and that keep pushing a way of working that is 20+ years old and hasn’t resulted in consistent, high-quality software.

I don’t care if you’re using a traditional waterfall process, or agile, or something else. There is a pragmatic, practical approach to software development and testing that works. It’s more than specific testing skills and tricks. Discipline, communication and collaboration are the key skills and characteristics we need. Continuous integration and automated build processes that run good regression tests are as just as essential as automated source code control.

Testers do need to learn new skills and techniques. More importantly, they need to get up from their workstations and (physically or virtually) go talk to other development and customer team members. We need to find out how we can all help each other do our best work and delight our customers.

What do you think is the most important thing testers need to do or know? What book is missing that would send newbie testers in the right direction?

I am extremely proud that our book is #28 on Jurgen Koop’s list of the top 50 new software development books! Also flattered to be in such excellent company on this list. There are some titles there that I hadn’t heard about before – time to go order some books! Check out the list and see what’s missing from your pile of books to read.