Agileista

Having had some time to myself recently, I've been reflecting on all the weird and wonderful implementations of Agile/Scrum that I've either; heard about, observed or been directly involved with. In doing this I've been reminded that it's all to easy to overcomplicate your agile process. In some cases even ignoring what could be considered the basics all together, without first trying them. One that I was reminded of recently is testing.

Why test?
Well it seems obvious doesn't it - we test stuff to see if it works. More than that we have tests and criteria so that we can see just how well it works and how healthy the work is. We test so that we can deliver value through quality software. So that we know what level of quality we are achieving; testing is one slice of the quality cake, a leading indicator of code and functional quality and sometimes lagging indicator of quality issues.

Creating acceptance tests also allows the Product Owner and the Team to explore the requirements and behavior together - its part of the conversation that they have when fleshing out the requirement before an iteration.