Walking the Agile Testing Tightrope 

This event is Sold-Out.

Testing in an Agile world requires a balance between total coverage and keeping up with the cadence. This talk aims to help you do just that by helping to walk the fine line between total automated coverage and the best use of your time. Discover techniques to make the most out of the tests you have time to automate!

Test automation is critical to preserving business value delivered in an agile organization. However, it is easy to get caught up in the path of testing stories and lose sight of the big picture. You know this is happening when you find yourself hurrying to complete test automation at the end of the sprint and wondering if you have the right coverage. Do you take automated testing out of the definition of “Done” for your stories in order to meet your sprint commitment? Do you delay closing stories for a sprint (or 2)? What are the ramifications of separating automation from story testing? How does the automation technology stack help, or hinder these decisions?

This presentation explores these questions. It includes a cautionary tale about trying to “automate everything”; explores the effect of tool decisions on test development and presents techniques to balance between automated test coverage and keeping in sync with the rest of the team.

Session Takeaways:

• Lessons learned when automating more than you should
• Techniques for selecting which test cases to automate
• Test Management techniques to keep test automation in-sync with the team
• How your test automation stack can help, or hurt your project
  

Bill Roske is the Principal Consultant and QA Architect at Magenic.  Areas of expertise include software quality strategy, Agile development and testing, software test automation, and testing infrastructures.  At Magenic, Bill focuses on delivering Quality Assurance approaches for clients, as well as developing re-usable solutions for Quality Assurance and Automated Testing.  With over 30 years of software industry experience, predominantly in quality engineering and testing, Bill is a visionary and creative problem solver.  Bill is a proud father and grandfather.  He is also a certified master mechanic and enjoys auto repair on the weekends.