RFI - James Lyndsay
i) What do you see as the biggest issue for Functional Testing Tools on Agile projects?
The efficient inclusion of the mind of a tester.
ii) What do you hope to contribute?
Imagination / intuition. Questions / experience.
iii) What do you hope to get?
An extension to my current imaginings. Perspective.
‘Test-infected’ agile methods bring code closer to expectations. As code gets better, the discovery, demonstration, investigation diagnosis and treatment of unexpected system behaviours will become a new focus. Functional testing tools will need to support this. Leveraging the strengths of existing confirmatory test frameworks will be of revolutionary benefit to diagnostic and exploratory testing.
I’m looking for ways that the extraordinary power of automated unit and acceptance tests can be used to diagnose and demonstrate unacceptable, unexpected behaviours. I don’t quite know what this might look like, but I’ll be on the lookout for ways that tests can be visualised, re-ordered and re-combined, can have their data manipulated, can fit within a framework of measurement … and I’ll be on the lookout for tools that observe in depth; spotting trends in measurements, patterns in databases, signal in noise.
Manually pushing tests through a UI in the hope of triggering and observing bugs is inefficient and ever-more irrelevant in an agile world - but testers minds still need to be involved in the observation, diagnosis and demonstration of real-world problems. The test-infected tools that agile teams use to structure their code and guard against unanticipated failure provide the best opportunity for this activity.