Automation crucial for Agile’s success !
Agile is incrementally building the whole project with smaller delivery cycles. I have written about that in few of my blogs http://www.nishantverma.com/2010/04/scrum-methodology.html . Automation in fact a good automation forms the core of agile project delivery.
I as a QA might not feel the need of automation much in earlier phase of project. But as we progress further, QA would start putting in estimate for “Regression Testing”. I remember my previous project where the regression phase used to take around 1-2 weeks depending on the features planned in the release or impact of refactoring. Trust me it’s very painful when you are following agile methodology and you don’t have automation in place. It’s a costly mistake. People at top thinks we are implementing agile and at the execution level people are little confused about that. :)
So in a typical agile methodology project, you need automation side by side your manual testing. You might struggle initially with the pace of QA sign-offs but down the line 4-5 months that automation will be life saver. All you would do in an iteration will be develop, test, automate new tests and run regression suite with every check-in. Needless to say fixing functional test suite is also accounted as QA activity in iteration.
So from a agile tester’s point of view, I have quite a lot to do on a simple project. So I would be lucky to have a tool/system where I write scenarios and mark them manual first and then just go ahead and automate it. Post automation just tag it to put things in proper place. And I think Twist do a brilliant job on this. Probably you should try it out !
I as a QA might not feel the need of automation much in earlier phase of project. But as we progress further, QA would start putting in estimate for “Regression Testing”. I remember my previous project where the regression phase used to take around 1-2 weeks depending on the features planned in the release or impact of refactoring. Trust me it’s very painful when you are following agile methodology and you don’t have automation in place. It’s a costly mistake. People at top thinks we are implementing agile and at the execution level people are little confused about that. :)
So in a typical agile methodology project, you need automation side by side your manual testing. You might struggle initially with the pace of QA sign-offs but down the line 4-5 months that automation will be life saver. All you would do in an iteration will be develop, test, automate new tests and run regression suite with every check-in. Needless to say fixing functional test suite is also accounted as QA activity in iteration.
So from a agile tester’s point of view, I have quite a lot to do on a simple project. So I would be lucky to have a tool/system where I write scenarios and mark them manual first and then just go ahead and automate it. Post automation just tag it to put things in proper place. And I think Twist do a brilliant job on this. Probably you should try it out !
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