Agile Testing

From Google's Agile testing videos I was about to learn many things about how to characterize an agile testing environment.  I can now draw parallels between what google considers an agile environment's strengths and weaknesses to what I've observed through my own work in what was an agile atmosphere. 


This kind of environment I feel lends itself to informality, and through google's discussion on agile projects and development I believe this is reinforced.  Often Elisabeth Hendrickson talked about how ideas were flowing on a verbal and fast paced manner.  This kind of informality that is inherent in this kind of environment puts an added amount of responsibility on the quality assurance team or quality assurer.  This means that to some degree the quality assurance team is seen as a bottleneck on a project and sometimes vilified by developers by inhibiting this fast paced environment.  This doesn't seem to compare to my personal experiences in an agile environment where the software quality was done through multiple tiers of tiers, and the development team always had their hands full with various defect and implementation related tasks. 


In response to the last video that questions the ability to gauge metrics in an agile environment I believe that this is one of the toughest aspects that go into planning prior to the beginning of an agile development cycle.  Obviously with the hectic nature of the development, certain problems would arise that wouldn't in the traditional atmosphere, this also means that these metrics must be interpreted and gathered quickly else the will no longer be valid given the speed of development, limiting their usefulness greatly.  So to resolve this, and depending on a few factors specific to the development team that is undertaking this project, I would stick to a small amount of crucial, easily recordable, lightweight metrics that can be automated to display a visual of the information rather than waste time finding the correct interpretation of a metric.  These metrics must be rigorously recorded and considered else they run the risk of fully undermining the agile process through a serious slowdown.  Though those may be some difficult tasks, agile testing also has some inherently good qualities that are noted throughout these videos.  The nature of the agile environment leads to code that comes in incrementally, meaning that any problem areas that arise can be easily found due to the digestible nature of the changes made by development and the tests pointed out by the assurance team.  That being said, it is the quality assurance team's best friend to automate as much as possible to save time.  Since saving time is paramount in an agile development project, automation of builds, testing, metric gathering and defect tracking all must be established before hand to provide a sturdy foundation from which the team quickly builds reliable software.