Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams 1st Edition

Although a thick book, I see this book as a starting point for testers. Well-written by people who have practical experience, it provides plenty of good advice. Of course, every project and application has its own quirks and challenges. This is not a good starting point for people with no prior software testing experience but is a good transition guide for testers moving from other methodologies to Agile. If you are not familiar with software testing, this book will be challenging to read, understand, and apply.

Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory is an invaluable resource for testers who are or will be making the transition from traditional waterfall testing to testing in a Scrum, XP, or other agile development methodology. This book is comprehensive in its treatment of the subject. It contains a great set of chapters that describe a tester's role through the stages of an agile project, but it is more than a mere blueprint or paint-by-numbers account.Before they get to that point, they help readers understand common organizational issues that hinder the transition to agile. They elaborate on the implications of the Agile Manifesto to how individuals, teams, and organizations operate. It is not ivory tower wisdom from above either, but it is rather hard fought, experienced based observations that will help novices avoid some of the potential growing pains. In addition, they give a solid taxonomy of test covering functional and non-functional. They address what types of testing to automate and when. Finally, they spend two chapters in detail on automation strategy and implementation. At regular intervals, readers see either "Lisa's Story" or "Janet's Story" that details with the concept being discussed. These either tell what worked well or how they overcame specific challenges.I found Crispin and Gregory had a very accessible writing style, and they do a great job of getting their point across. If you are a traditional tester who is unsure or even afraid of moving into the agile world, this is the book that you need. They tackle the tough questions that most people have one by one with answers that can be put in practice. I plan to use the wisdom of this book in helping my testing organization make the transition. I highly recommend this book.Overall: A

I picked up this book when I took a job that required building a QA team from the ground up in an agile development environment that had already been developing for six months.I say that because the usefulness of this book has a lot to do with your organization, and what your starting point is. If you are working on a development team starting from scratch then this is a must read for any lead or manager involved. There is a ton of high level conceptual information in here that will help you draw out an outline of what you need to think about in terms of testing over the next few months. This runs from what broad categories needs to be tested (Security, -ility, GUI, etc.) to who is responsible for automation (Unit test, API testing, etc.). I can honestly say that sticking to these concepts will help you make a better product faster.Here's the downside. If you are coming in midway through a project then get ready for the battle of a lifetime getting this stuff implemented no matter how much sense it makes. Unit testing, as an example, is constantly brought up throughout the book, and that is not something that you can get up and going with a snap of your fingers. Especially if you have to educate development on how to do it. This book provides little support in that sort of area, and, honestly, that is most likely the scenario that most people in QA will run into. I have been in QA for ten years, and every place I have worked either had no unit testing at all or the had just enough to claim that they did.The reality is that Agile Testing in this book equates to Test Driven Development with QA support. That mean QA is responsible for a lot of solution, end to end, and customer requirement verification testing, but very little feature and functionality testing since that is expected to be done in unit testing. If you are in QA and you need to read this book then you almost certainly do no have that already, and need a book that tells you how to do it.So, anyways, this book is worth reading if you are just starting out, but make sure you are reading it with development and project management as well. If you are not just starting out then In my opinion these steps are required:1. Get acceptance from Management, Dev, and Project Management that your current model is not sustainable, and that resources will be allocated to changing that.2. Read this book with all of those involved.3. Meet up and list out what the book recommends, where you are strong, and where you are weak.4. Use that as a starting point to find other books and resources to strengthen up your weak points.5. Make sure that management makes the success of these changes part of everyone's job responsibility, and emphasizes it as part of performance evaluations. Period.In my experience, if you can't get the five steps above completed then you might as well throw this book out the window, because you'll waste a bunch of time implementing QA practices that will fail miserably due to their reliance on a non existant foundation. Step five is the real key. Otherwise you get one of the following:1. "Great Idea!" with no action following2. "You're right, we need these changes," and then an expectation that QA will be responsible for all of them. Including things like forcing individual dev's to do unit testing.The weakness in the book is that it doesn't really address the needs of QA in terms of helping you get through those five steps.If you use this book as a planning tool then you will be in good shape and the value is absolutely there. It is a quick and easy read, gets the concepts across in a way that pretty much anyone can understand, and does so convincingly. Just don't go in expecting it to answer all your problems without some supplemental reading. You will need to read up on automation and unit testing frameworks and test driven development.

How delightful that two of the agile community's "rock stars" of testing have teamed up to write the guide that every agile team member needs on agile testing!Chock-full of side stories, examples, wisdom points, and handy chapter mind maps, the authors cover the entire range of possible topics you need to know about agile testing. This book will serve your team well and is an excellent book to include as part of your team's community of practice book club.In addition, I urge all business analysts moving to agile to get this book. Business analysts need to extend their skills and knowledge into the testing arena. With guidance from Lisa and Janet, you'll see how the testing mind set truly drives development to deliver value.

I bought the book to expand my knowledge of software into agile projects. The content of the book is outstanding. What I found is that most projects calling themselves "agile" were not eve close to agile.The book's content was very well presented and easy to understand and provided information that I could put to use the next day. I spent about 5 hours reading the book the day before getting on a 5 hour flight to help get a distressed project out of distress and was able to used the concepts in the book to that end.Highly recommended for software testing professionals that want to learn the right way to do things.