About 7 years into my career as a test analyst, I noticed a huge surge in the use of the term “Agile”.
Companies were setting themselves up as Agile Testing specialists and consultancy companies were offering to come and train your test team in the discipline of “Agile Testing”.
Recruitment agencies would regularly phone me and say “have you got Agile?” but when I asked them what they meant by that, they could never tell me.
I was confused. I was familiar with development methodologies that were considered to come under the “Agile” umbrella but nowhere could I find any specific information on Agile Testing.
Image courtesy of bobistravelling via Flickr. Various rights reserved
However, just because I couldn’t find it, it didn’t mean that it didn’t exist. I was probably just looking in the wrong places.
After getting thoroughly frustrated by my fruitless searches, I thought it might be best to go right to the root of the term Agile in the I.T. sense. This term comes from “Manifesto for Agile Software Development” which is a list of 12 principles co-authored by 17 people. One of these 17, Brian Marick, has a background in testing.
Mr Marick runs a website at www.exampler.com and I found a link to a section on Agile Testing. Surely here, I would find the answers to what Agile Testing really was. I did but it wasn’t what I’d expected.
The first line on the page read as follows:
“As one of the authors of the Agile Manifesto, I want to understand how to apply its ideals and principles to software testing. This page represents an early start in that direction”.
I want to understand? You mean you don’t understand already? But how can that be? All these companies are set up proclaiming to be experts in Agile Testing and the one co-author of the Agile Manifesto with a testing background is stating that he is only beginning to understand it himself.
Well, there was the answer. Testing in an Agile environment was (and in many regards, still is) fairly embryonic.
Brian Marick has made further strides since then and is always worth a read with regards to all things testing but two lessons learned that day were:
- The term “Agile” has been diluted by becoming a poorly used buzzword by those who want to profit on the ignorance of others.
- The term "Agile" has been diluted further by people jumping on a bandwagon of pretending to understand a term that everyone else is claiming to understand.
Getting to those conclusions used a simple approach that’s always a good one to apply to testing.
If you think you have found a problem but everyone else is telling you that you are wrong, firstly assume that you might be and confirm whether or not you are mistaken. Everyone makes mistakes, including testers however never lose confidence to explore the possibility that you are, in fact, correct no matter how many people are telling you otherwise. (Tenacity is a great quality for a tester).
Never lose the confidence to admit that you don't understand something. This is a strength and not a weakness. Often the first step to understanding is admitting that you don't!
Tags: Manifesto, Marick, Testing, Agile