Why do testers on some agile teams find iterations productive and enjoyable, while other teams struggle to “keep up” with testing and get stories to “done done” within the iteration? Succeeding with agile testing is more than just automating tests or sitting with the developers. To create working software quickly, your whole team must be able to build a shared understanding of a feature - and do this rapidly, accurately, over and over again, every feature, every iteration. This hands-on tutorial teaches you how to use the agile technique of acceptance criteria to build shared understanding.

Different testing approaches are needed because quality has many aspects besides functional requirements, such as making sure the code is reliable and secure. How do you know you’ve done the kinds of testing and quality processes are necessary for your product, especially on an agile project?

The Agile Testing Quadrants help you categorize tests and plan for different testing activities needed over the life of a project. It can be used by the team as a base for this common vocabulary about testing, and as a mechanism to start discussions and encourage collaboration.

In the battle of YAGNI and the performance testers, who wins out on an agile project? Join us as we walk through a historical account of what happens when you need to meet heavy performance targets on an agile project. Find out what was at stake, and the dire consequences if either side annihilated the other. We’ll focus on technical detail, planning and management techniques that led to the only outcome, collaborative success! Finally, discover the impact this battle had in the war agile wages to align the needs of end customers, the business, and IT, to see how it all worked out.

There are quite a few good tools available for developers who are interested in writing more expressive tests. These cover a broad spectrum from unit testing and mocking frameworks to executable requirements platforms. But sometimes in our excitement for learning new tools we overlook the most useful tool of all…the language features of our chosen programming language. In this session we will get back to basics by exploring how you can write more expressive tests using the language features of Java, the framework features of JUnit, and the practice of Behavior Driven Development.

Despite what you may have heard, analysis is still an important aspect of projects done in an agile manner. Teams still need to understand what they are delivering in what order. The trick is to how to utilize traditional analysis techniques without introducing the corresponding waste that can be experienced with those techniques. In this session, we introduce Feature Injection and demonstrate how it combines traditional analysis techniques and the agile technique Behavior Driven Development to identify the business value delivered by a project without introducing analysis paralysis.

A good QA is worth their weight in gold, but the reality is that the best QA often have trouble working in an Agile Environment. The shift to a quality centred approach surely must be every QA’s dream but there are underlying issues that prevent this adoption. In this session we delve into the mind of a career tester, probe the pain points & explore strategies to communicate the value of agile testing to the classically trained. We look at personalities & what drives people to want to test & the benefits that QA provide to a project beyond rubber-stamping the ‘done’ column on the task board.

In this session, you will learn one thing: how to enable emergent design in a database. The reality is that database development is different from application code development. They are similar, but databases bring about some forces that we haven’t given much thought.

This session challenges traditional, foundational database development techniques and proposes a new framework into which Agile processes, as well as techniques such as TDD or refactoring, can better fit.