Key Success Factors

Having traveled through an iteration and beyond, following an agile tester as she engages in many activities, we can now pick out some key factors that help testers succeed on agile teams and help agile teams succeed at delivering a high-quality product. We think agile testers have something special to offer. " Agile-infected " testers learn how to apply agile practices and principles to help their whole team produce a better product. " Test-infected " programmers on agile teams learn how to use testing to produce better work. Lines between roles are blurred, but that's a good thing. Everyone is focused on quality. We have gleaned some critical testing guidelines for agile teams and testers from our own trial and error as well as from teams with which we've worked. These guidelines are built on the agile testing matrix, on our experience of learning to overcome cultural and organizational obstacles, our adventures in performing the tester role on agile teams, and our experience of figuring out how best to use test automation. We like lucky numbers, so in this chapter we present seven key factors that help an agile tester succeed. We asked a small group of people who were reviewing some of our chapters to suggest the order in which to present these success factors. The results varied quite a bit, although many (but not all) agreed on the top two. Pick the success factor that will give you the biggest return on investment, and start working on it today.