Succeeding with Agile

Why Testing at the End Doesn’t Work

There are many reasons why the traditional approach of deferring testing until the end does not work:

• It is hard to improve the quality of an existing product. It has always seemed to me that it is easy to lower the quality of a product but that it is difficult and time consuming to improve it. Think about a time in your past when you were working on an application that had already shipped. Let’s say you were asked to add a new set of features while simultaneously improving the existing application’s quality. Despite lots of good work on your part, it is likely that months or even a year or more passed before quality improved enough that users could notice. Yet this is exactly what we try to do when we test ...