A pragprog book by the title “ThoughtWorks Anthology – Essays on Software, Technology and Innovation” has been hanging around the office gathering dust for the past few months. While waiting for a regression test run to finish today, I picked up the book and found, on page 177, a chapter (no 13) with the title: “Agile vs Waterfall Testing for Enterprise Web Apps”. Intrigued, I borrowed the book and read the chapter on the way home.
ThoughtWorks Anthology
If you haven’t done agile testing before or have just started and want a gentle introduction to the differences between testing in a waterfall world and the agile world, this is a great book.
It goes through the following:
- Comparison of the waterfall and agile Testing Lifecycles
- The different types of testing that occur (unit, functional, exploratory, etc)
- Environment management (dev vs int vs stage environments) – what kind of testing to do where; what kind of sign-off to get in which environment
- Tools required to get the job done (…though what is QTP doing in a list of recommended software automation tools!? …in an agile-focused book!?!!? …seriously?!?!???!)
- Test-related roles within the team
- …a few more things
Seriously, if you want a good high-level intro to agile testing, get this book. If you’ve been doing agile testing for a while, it’s still worth skimming over.
