Thursday, November 21, 2013

Does Agile Allow for Effective Software Testing?

My experience with the Agile process has been geared to manual and automated testing.  The software developers spend 3 sprint periods developing new features and fixing defects.  At the end of the 3 sprints the developers deliver a new product with an outline of new features and fixed defects.  This gives the testing team 2 sprints to test the software and report any new defects or report if existing defects still exist.

For this process to work correctly the developers must be able to deliver working software by the end of the period and when the testers receive the software they must have all resources needed in a properly operational state.  In my experience it has been very difficult for developers to release working software on time which limits the time available for testers.

Once the testers receive the software there are sometimes a shortage of resource to do the proper testing.  Many times this is because the testing resources are expensive.  There often are technical or mechanical issues that make some testing resources unavailable. 

After the testing has been done there are new defects that must be planned into the next few sprints.  When the software has many new defects this limits the amount of new features that the developers can implement within the next few sprints.  With an unknown amount of defects after each testing sprint it makes it hard to plan new features.

In summary I believe that to create an environment that is conducive to proper testing the organization must have very good procedures in place to ensure that deadlines are met and resources are available when needed. Again, this is another example of how it takes an organization some trial and error to properly use the Agile development process.


Leslie P ---Extra Blog Post

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