Many organizations are adopting Agile development practices and the Scrum framework for project management. With a software testing perspective, one of the main challenges of this approach is to complete all software testing activities during iterations that could last only one to two weeks. In this article, Clemens Reijnen provides five tips for getting software testing done in a Scrum sprint.
The goal at the end of a Scrum iteration, also called sprint, is to provide potentially shippable software. To achieve this “Done” status, all software testing activities (unit, functional, integration, load) should have been completed. The tips provided in the article are:
1. Developers and testers have to work together as a team.
2. Write logical acceptance tests.
3. Use a risk and business driven test approach.
4. Classify your regression test cases in separate sets
5. Know when, how and what could be covered by automated tests
This last tip is discussed in details with hints on when to choose the no automation, record and playback or write your own test scripts approach. The article makes references to a .NET context and Visual Studio technologies, but the principles can be applied to any software development environment.