Is Agile Testing oxymoron?
Does Agile make life for testers more difficult?
Agile was though by developers to solve specific developers' issues. However, for other trades like QA Agile has done not much, and arguably has complicated our life a bit more, if nothing else creating false expectations: integration testing, performance testing, stress testing and so on can not follow an Agile model, despite some project managers wish it could.
I would to start a discussion around this topic, if nothing else to gauge the opinion of fellow QA engineers. If nothing else may provide some food for thought for project managers that think that vague user stories with changing details are enough to develop a good test script!
Unfortunately, only Jason M. Morgan replied to my post. His comments are
My most recent employer was using Scrum. The QA activities related to the new features being developed in the scrum team fit easily into the sprints. But there were larger testing activities such as regression testing that were to big for one team or even one sprint. So I had to break down the regression testing into small pieces that could be assigned to each team within a sprint. It was a lot of overhead for no benefit other than following the scrum model.
So, clearly, this topic didn't awake the imagination of testers. However, I still think that Agile, as currently formulated and applied, doesn't make life easier for tester and I will argue that to other trades involves in the software development process.
I think that Agile contains a lot of good principles and it makes a lot of sense to use it in most projects, specially the small/middle size. But I would like to see Agile taking into account the needs of Business Analyst, Technical Writers, Trainers, Infrastructure, QA and QC. For example, it is very difficult for a Technical Writer to put a story into words without really knowing how the other stories have been implemented. The same for a tester: it is possible to test the flow of a single story, but it is much harder to imagine how this story interacts with others if they exist only in concept (think about processing a payment as one story, but the create payment story still is under development). It is in this context that I say Agile has shifted work from development to the other areas. Now the question is not to throw Agile away, but how to extend its benefits to everybody that contributes to the completion of a project.
