In recent years, agile development has become popular, and agile testing has made great progress in China. Coupled with the rise of DevOps, it has further promoted the shift of testing to the left (testing forward) and testing to the right (online testing). For example, everyone began to pay attention to the continuous construction of software and test automation, extensively used open source tools that embody agile testing ideas, and began to explore the provision of various testing services through software testing platforms.
This shows that the ideas and methods of agile testing can stand the test of time, and it also shows that the testing industry has indeed achieved certain results in exploring and promoting agile testing.
But from another perspective, many people's understanding of agile testing is still not accurate enough, which leads to the fact that agile-based testing practices are often similar in appearance but not in spirit. To make matters worse, according to the 2019 survey data, software testing has become the biggest bottleneck of agile delivery . The main problems that lead to this situation are:
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Insufficient attention to testing, continuous delivery forces continuous testing, but continuous testing cannot be achieved;
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Facing the new software development model, there is a lack of coping strategies, and even the risk-based testing strategy is not well implemented;
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Insufficient coordination between testing and development, and insufficient development support for automated testing, resulting in relatively high costs for automated testing;
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Passionate about recruiting test development and reinventing the wheel, the effectiveness of automated testing is relatively low, and the testing efficiency is also low;
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Enthusiastic about technology, but lack of thinking about testing itself, the real testing ability has not been significantly improved;
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The built-in quality culture of the enterprise has not been formed, the defect prevention is poor, and even the foundation of quality management has been in disrepair for a long time.
It is also seeing these problems and seeing the poor situation of testing in agile that the new book "Agile Testing: Promoting Continuous Delivery with Continuous Testing" co-authored by well-known scholars Zhu Shaomin and Li Jie came into being !
1. How professional are the two authors?
The first author Zhu Shaomin is a distinguished professor of Tongji University, the leader of the software green alliance standard evaluation team, the reviewer of "Journal of Software", and the initiator of the QECon conference. He has been engaged in software testing and quality management related work for nearly 30 years. This book is also his Another masterpiece after "Full Software Testing".
The other author, Li Jie, is currently the testing director of Chuangda Software Co., Ltd., and has more than 20 years of experience in software testing technology and management.
Ten years ago, Mr. Zhu Shaomin began to publish a series of articles in magazines and professional technical media, such as "Methods and Practices of Agile Testing", "Thinking and New Development of Agile Testing", "What is Agile Testing", " How to prevent testing from becoming a stumbling block to agile", etc. Almost at the same time, Mr. Li Jie also began to transform from traditional development to agile development in companies such as Nokia and POLYCOM, and personally practiced agile development.
They are the first group of people in China who began to think about how software testing can adapt to agile development and have persisted. It is also based on persistence that in the extraordinary year of 2020, the two authors began to cooperate comprehensively and opened the " Efficient Agile Testing" column, and on this basis, reorganize and enrich the content together to form this book.
2. Use continuous testing to promote continuous delivery and break through bottlenecks
As mentioned earlier, testing has become the biggest bottleneck in the entire continuous delivery process. Without removing this bottleneck, it is impossible to achieve the main goal of Agile, DevOps - continuous delivery. This book is written to help the reader's team achieve this goal. If continuous testing is achieved, the test can be started at any time and the necessary tests can be completed at any time. For example, two weeks is an iteration cycle, and the tests that should be completed should be completed in those two weeks. Moreover, during the entire testing process, there is no waiting for testing, test analysis, design and execution can be carried out smoothly, and testing and development can be well connected or integrated. Only by doing continuous testing can we support continuous delivery, adapt to the ever-increasing market changes, and satisfy users in such a market environment.
Agile testing is not only continuous testing, having the values advocated by the Agile Manifesto, and adhering to the principles of agile development, but also includes a set of software testing solutions, including testing thinking, testing process, testing infrastructure and a series of good practices, etc., the maximum Maximize efficient testing and continuous improvement.
Agile testing has developed to this day, and there are many successful experiences and some failures. Now is an era of information explosion, and you can get all kinds of information about agile testing by searching the Internet casually. It becomes more difficult to distinguish what is really effective agile testing, because there are various opinions and lack of systematic and thorough elaboration , Misunderstanding, and even think that agile testing is a basket, I want to put all good things in it, neither fish nor fowl. We need to re-recognize agile testing, comprehensively improve personal testing capabilities, and be able to truly implement agile testing and substantially improve testing efficiency. This is also a major reason for publishing "Agile Testing" .
3. What is covered in "Agile Testing"
Agile testing is a set of solutions suitable for or conforming to agile development, including testing thinking, testers/organizations, testing techniques, methods, processes, and tools. This book systematically expounds these contents, with real cases running through the contents of the book, combining theory and practice, and based on the best practices in the industry.
This book strives to present the specific operation process of agile testing in an intuitive and concise way, and introduces as many effective testing methods, technologies and tools as possible, including intelligent testing technology, container-based test environment deployment, etc. In addition, this book also teaches them how to do agile testing, not only explaining how to do agile testing, but also explaining why it is done, and even helping readers expand their testing horizons, further consolidate basic testing skills, reconstruct testing skills, and build a good agile thinking , Lifelong benefit.
The book has a total of 10 chapters, sharing knowledge of 3 major levels and 10 modules.
The whole book first uses a chapter to pave the way, reviewing agile values and development principles, and understanding different and specific agile development frameworks . If you already have a good grasp of agile development methods, you can skip this chapter and start reading directly from Chapter 2. Readers are advised to carefully read and slowly understand the content of Chapter 2, and don’t think that “thoughts and ways of thinking” are relatively empty, because in the “Tao Magic Tool”, Tao is at the forefront, which is more important than principles, methods, techniques and tools. Important, this is the basis.
The next two chapters lay the groundwork. Because human factors and the construction of organizational culture are decisive factors for the success of agile testing, many seemingly technical problems are actually human problems in essence . Therefore, before entering the specific operation explanation of agile testing, we must first talk about people and organizational culture. Chapter 3 focuses on who and how to assume the responsibility of testing in agile development, whether to set up full-time testers; if set, how to operate? If not set, how to operate? It also discusses how the team transforms, how to build a learning team, and the collaboration between different roles. Even if you don’t engage in agile testing, these contents are very valuable, but they are more valuable in agile testing, because agile puts more emphasis on learning and collaboration , growth, etc.
Chapter 4 discusses the infrastructure of agile testing , including how to apply virtual machine technology, container technology, etc. to build a test environment and how to use advanced and appropriate technologies to realize automatic verification of infrastructure, etc., all of which are to better support automation Testing, support for automatic deployment, support and CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery) integration, etc., this is the technical basis. You'll see agile testing ubiquitous in continuous integration, continuous delivery, and DevOps implementations.
Next, five chapters will be used to introduce in detail how to implement efficient agile testing, from test left shift (including requirements review, design review and the most thorough test left shift ATDD, etc.), test plan, test analysis and design, test execution to the end the complete process . The premise of this process is the agile development model. Requirements are described by user stories and changes are relatively frequent, iterations are also fast, and testing is very challenging. Therefore, this part focuses on how to deal with these challenges, such as:
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What are some good testing strategies?
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How can automated testing be carried out more efficiently?
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How to organically combine exploratory testing and automated testing?
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Which testing tools to choose...etc.
In this part, readers will learn many excellent agile testing strategies, methods and technical practices . Finally, look forward to future agile testing, such as how to test big data systems, intelligent system testing, how to use artificial intelligence technology to serve testing, future agile testing tools, etc.
There is a mind map at the beginning of each chapter to guide everyone to learn, and there is an extended reading at the end of each chapter to trigger readers' new thinking and provide better reading materials to expand the capabilities of the book or break the limitations of the book, so that Readers gain more.
Becoming an agile test engineer today is driven by the general trend and driven by the self , because everyone always aspires to be an excellent professional. By reading this book, I believe you can achieve:
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Really understand what agile testing is, better integrate into the agile development environment, and have more harmonious communication and collaboration with business, product, development and other related personnel;
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Understand the specific operation of agile testing, complete test analysis, design and execution faster and more effectively, achieve twice the result with half the effort, and test work will become easier in the future.
If you are a R&D manager or project manager , I hope you can gain more benefits, enhance your understanding of the overall situation of agile testing, and understand the following operations and management:
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How to complete the transformation from traditional testing to agile testing, including the establishment of agile culture;
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How to build an effective agile testing system, including effective testing process, stable and efficient infrastructure or automated testing platform;
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How to guide the team and engineers to carry out testing work, greatly improve testing efficiency, achieve continuous testing, and meet the requirements of continuous delivery;
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How to coordinate the communication and collaboration of different teams and different positions to help the entire team improve the quality and efficiency of R&D.
I hope you like this book, let us start this journey of agile testing together and build a brilliant future!
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