Agile Testing:How does it help in the proactive way of avoiding bugs?

[mansi gupte]

Hi,

I wished to know whether agile testing can be used in a proactive way to avoid the bugs in sofware projects?

Thanks,
Piya

[Paul Sturrock]

All testing is (by nature) reactive. Not sure how you proactively test for anything? I suppose the only proactive part is the up front acknowledgment that there will be defects in your code perhaps?

[Janet Gregory]

Actually, testing in an agile way is all about preventing bugs. We encourage testers to be working with the whole team during planning sessions to question, uncover hidden assumptions, etc. If descrepenices are talked about early, then many of the bugs never arise - they have been prevented.

Both Lisa and I have mentioned the agile testing quadrants in previous answers. The 2 left hand quadrands are tests that support the team to encourage the developers to code the right stuff. These "tests" are written before a single line of code is written. Once a team gets good at this, often the only bugs found are the ones which no one even thought of before... that is where exploratory testing comes into play.


Janet

[Gian Franco]

Janet Gregory wrote:Actually, testing in an agile way is all about preventing bugs. We encourage testers to be working with the whole team during planning sessions to question, uncover hidden assumptions, etc. If descrepenices are talked about early, then many of the bugs never arise - they have been prevented.

Both Lisa and I have mentioned the agile testing quadrants in previous answers. The 2 left hand quadrands are tests that support the team to encourage the developers to code the right stuff. These "tests" are written before a single line of code is written. Once a team gets good at this, often the only bugs found are the ones which no one even thought of before... that is where exploratory testing comes into play.

Hi Janet,

I hope you don't mind, since you are in the spotlights, but I would like to point to an interesting Google techtalk of Mary Poppendieck: Competing on the basis of speed

She mentions the quadrants and the preventive testing approach...

Cheers,

Gian