Agile Software Development

At the Agile Open Europe conference I participated in a discussion on the subject of acceptance testing. One of the open questions was how to match "traditional" customers with the agile idea of delivering a potentially shippable product every few weeks.

Different Types of Customers
While some customers are delighted to receive a new release every month, there are others that don't even want to see or know about any of the intermediate releases. Some customers simply insist on working the traditional way. They hire a team of testers for a couple of weeks before the intended release date, and they require the development team to deliver one release candidate, just in time for the test period, and the team should then stop working on the system until the test team has finished testing.

Scrum is an agile software development process with a high focus on the project management level. It has a concept of a sprint review in the end of the iterations, where the product backlog items taken into sprint (and possibly the whole sprint) are accepted or rejected. It is possible and even recommended to accept or pre-accept some items already during the iteration, but it is not mandatory and is not always possible.

During sprint review Product Owner indeed can reject the content, because the team got him wrong, perceived quality is low, some old features got broken or team simply did not have enough time to finish everything it was hoping to deliver. Then what does the rejection mean? Isn't it a bit too naive to expect the people disappointed by rejection deliver better during the next sprint? Isn't it easier just to add some "fix tasks" to the backlog?

I wrote about Acceptance Testing earlier and why it is a very important tool for agile development. In this post, I will talk about how we can make acceptance testing really agile. Actually, it's nothing more special than making Acceptance Testing a part of your Continuous Integration (CI) (an XP Primary Practice). Continuous Integration is the practice of merging, building, and testing code on a continuous basis (almost instantaneous basis).

What is acceptance testing?

Acceptance testing is a black-box testing performed on a software prior to its delivery. It involves running a suite of tests on a completed system (ref: Wikipedia). These test suites are made up of multiple tests or test cases. Each test case consists of a sequence of steps to perform which emulate the use case that is being tested; it also contains input data (if required) as well as the expected output. The result of a test case is either a pass or a fail.