Beautiful Testing

Chapter 15. Beautiful Testing As the Cornerstone of Business Success

Lisa Crispin

In March of 2009, during his “Travels in Software” tour, Brian Marick visited our team. He interviewed several of us about our experiences working together as an agile team for more than five years. I’ve been a tester on this team since it adopted Scrum in 2003. When Brian’s interview with me was almost over, he remarked, “We’ve talked for an hour and you haven’t mentioned testing.” That made me laugh, but it was true. I’d spent all the time talking about how we work together to deliver more business value in better ways. When I first thought about the term “beautiful testing,” this synergy is what came to my mind.

People try to quantify testing in various ways. What about its qualities? I imagine that most people don’t associate the words “beautiful” and “testing” in the same sentence. For me, the beauty of testing lies in the team’s absolute commitment to quality, to doing the right thing, and to doing things right. My team at ePlan Services Inc. focuses on testing to help the business achieve healthy growth. To paraphrase Elisabeth Hendrickson, we don’t see testing as a phase. It’s an integral part of software development, equal in value to coding. Everyone on the team drives themselves to deliver the highest quality software possible, which means everyone on the team does a beautiful job of testing.

Figure 15-1. Mindmap of Chapter 15

My team’s commitment ...