Agile Testing
Don’t wait until the product is ready. Make quality a priority at Sprint Zero.
Speed-to-Market
In today’s competitive environment speed to market is more important than ever. Agile Testing helps speed up the release cycle while maintaining a quality product.
Shorter Feedback Loops
Why wait 2 weeks or more for testing feedback? Agile testing provides the immediate feedback that saves time and keeps your team moving.
Responsible Teams
Agile is based on communication and team responsibility. Agile Testing is therefore a team effort. When the team collectively makes testing and prevention a priority, everyone benefits.
How it Works
Continuous Feedback
Through continuous feedback loops, your team will sprint faster, act quicker, and build high quality software more efficiently. Built on a structured feedback loop and founded on the Agile principal of communication, continuous feedback is critical to the success of your team.
Advocate Quality
Agile Testing is about being an advocate for quality throughout the development cycle. At Sprint planning sessions the Agile Tester is responsible to advocate quality and testing. At Scrum meetings the Agile Tester is interacting with the group always as an advocate for quality and for the customer.
Collaboration
Collaboration between business and development, a core principle of Agile, is a critical component of successful Agile Testing. The goal is to focus on defect prevention as early in the Sprint as possible. Finding defects late in the Sprint is more expensive and slows down the release cycle.
Continuous Improvement
Another principle of Agile, continuous improvement, is an important aspect of all projects. Agile teams should continuously strive for improvement in communication, software definition, testing, and quality management.
The Sprint Cycle
A Different Method
Agile is truly a unique methodology.
Sprint Planning
The Agile tester has much to do right out of the gate. During Sprint Planning, the Agile Tester helps with defining story points, identifies tasks and estimates, confirm test environment availability, designs test cases, analyzes user stories, confirms acceptance criteria, and more.
Backlog Grooming
The role of Quality during Backlog Grooming is essential. Agile Testers can help prevent defects before they are detected during testing. Thorough user story analysis and high collaboration with the team exposes defects early in the Sprint resulting in less testing and development time. This eliminates a lot of work later in the Sprint to deal with the defect. This is the front line in prevention vs. detection.
Standups
Brief (daily) standup meetings are important to keep the team aligned on the current sprint activities. SWATs Agile Testers will actively participate to communicate recent progress, any newly found issues, and share what’s next on their task list.
Sprint Review
Sprint reviews are essential to confirm the sprints outcome against customer expectations. Our Agile Testers are experienced at presenting new features to customers in a straight forward manner.
Sprint Retrospective
Retrospective meetings should result in providing the team with a reflection of past activities. The items should be answers to what the team should: start doing, stop doing, and continue doing. Agile Testers can provide input to continually improve the teams agility.
Why SWAT?
Experience
Our 20 years in Software Testing is why our clients trust us with their Testing needs.
Scalability
Our team is scalable and can react quickly to the changing needs of Agile. Through both staffing and on-demand resource models, we can scale to your project demands and schedule.
Proven
Over the years our team has evolved with Agile to fuse together the best practices in quality with best practices in Agile.