agile

The good news is: Agile is going mainstream; it is not some fad nor is it just for unwashed coders. Managers get it. The not so good news is: this means the approach to introducing Agile needs to change.

Agile Software Development started at the code face. Kent Beck's original Extreme Programming had little - if anything - to say about the wider organization and the role of management. Developers could - and did - just adopt practices like test driven development and stand-up meetings.

As a test professional in waterfall, I was used to getting the code much later and buggier than I expected and being under tremendous pressure to finish my testing before the go-live date hit. Then one day, I found out that there was a better way. Testers could be involved much earlier in the lifecycle, they could participate in requirements and design decisions as they happened, and the code could actually be unit tested before I received it! Heaven? Nope, agile.

A variety of agile software development methods and practices have now been around for a solid ten years and existed for at least another ten years prior. Configuration management (CM) for agile development has now been discussed since the turn of the century. So what are the core principles of CM and how can CM help agile teams?

Exploratory testing—questioning and learning about the product as you design and execute tests rather than slavishly following predefined scripts—makes sense for many projects. But does it make sense for agile projects? In this column, Johanna Rothman examines how exploratory testing might work on an agile project.