What is software test and agile testing?

Do you remember Martin Fowler’s word from session 9 about IT Architecture that “creating high quality software is not expensive – creating high quality software is the cheapest solution”?

We fully believe this in Right People Group, and this why we strongly believe that an orientation against quality is essential in all phases of software development. Software test is a very important part of this quality orientation.

Everybody can do software test to a certain extent, but there is a huge difference in the capacity of somebody with just an intuitive understanding of test versus a true test professional.

Furthermore, we like to deliver software developers that have specific experience as software testers, and we can never accept software developers with the attitude that their job is only to develop and “then the testers must test it”.

Testing and quality orientation is for everyone and in all phases. One reason for this is that the cost of changes rises exponentially throughout a project. Look at the graph below for an illustration of this.

Before we start digging deep into the different types of test, let us just go through some fundamental principles of software test:

Types of test

To understand the role of software test in software projects, the V-model is a good place to start. The V-model is the classical “waterfall” process for software development and software test. Even though agile development is getting more and more popular it is still important to understand the V-model, as we see that most customers in agile environment still to a certain extent follow the V-model, they just have many small agile iterations of the V-model instead of one “big bang”.

The V-model gives you a good conceptual understanding of what types of test relates to which parts of the specification phase – please look at the figure below:

Let us take a detailed walk through of the different types of software testing in the video below. Note that some of the types of tests mentioned in the video, you can see on the V-model:

Agile test

The role of test professionals changes dramatically from a waterfall software development process to an agile process. Let us take a closer look at this:

Test Automation

Test automation is brilliant and a crucial part of modern software development. But it is not a silver bullet that can solve everything. We see customers that get amazing value from test automation, but we also see companies that have focused on the wrong things for their test automation leading to high cost of maintenance compared to the value the test automation brings.

The video below will give an intro to test automation:

Role of Test Manager

Right People Group often delivers highly experienced test professionals to lead the test effort in our customer’s project.

Let us start by looking at the classical role of a “Test Manager”:

However, a “Test Manager” is not a defined role in agile projects, so what happens to the role of a test manager in agile environments:

Test Driven Development

Test Driven Development (TDD) is based on the principle that developers write their unit test before they actually code the functionality. It is not easy to implement and can require a great change management effort towards the developers in some organisations. However, when implemented it brings high value and can simply become the “standard way of working” in a development team:

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