Sam Clarke facilitates session at TMS 2009

26th Jan 2009

 

"Agile seems to have cracked the unit test issue but what about the rest of testing?"

Sam will draw on experience gained whilst developing and implementing automated testing for the Government Gateway (a large complex authentication and routing system) to demonstrate how the approach could be applied to the perceived testing challenges of the Agile methodology.

The challenges faced by the test team had many similarities with Agile projects. These included:

• Provide continuous and robust testing on each build of the system
• Perform regression testing to ensure changes were  fully backwards compatible
• Ensure user applications were not compromised by changes

The solution was to incrementally construct an automated set of functional tests. The approach, which is more resilient to change than traditional automation, involved the abstraction of the test definitions away from the underlying automation toolset. This approach and the use of test automation tools is well placed to be help solve the challenges of continuous functional and acceptance testing in an Agile continuous build environment.

After a short presentation a facilitated discussion will take place covering:

• Participant experience with testing practices in an Agile environment
• Discussion on testing experience, particularly automated Functional Testing with "Continual integration"
• Discussion on raw automation or decoupled with frameworks? Positives, negatives and interesting facts
• Discussion on whether we agree that Agile and Scrum have cracked the unit test issue?
• Wrap up and summary

To find out more about the Test Management Summit, please go to http://uktmf.com/index.php?q=node/137;

Following Sam's successful and well attended session; please find the sessions output:

Test Management Summit Workshop Feedback
Test Management Summit Slide Deck

Sam Clarke Bio:
Sam has 40 years experience in IT. He specialises in IT related testing and has a proven record of defining, implementing and managing testing strategies for proprietary software development, banking, insurance, utilities, manufacturing, retail, and telecommunications. He uses his consulting experience to review and report on an organisation’s testing processes giving options for improvement where necessary. Sam is skilled in facilitation of workshops covering project definition, project risks, test strategy, problem solving and quality improvement. Now a Principal Consultant at nFocus, his background includes consultancy and test management at IBM Global Services and IBM Product Development. He’s a popular and well known speaker having presented at several UK, European and international testing and quality conferences.

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