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Validation in Agile Development

Here's a question we were faced moving forward to Agile - we're all happy doing sprints, TDD and Unit Testing - but for us the definition of DONE must include the overall System functionality. So yes, we can implement functionality into user stories and implement them as such, but in the end we are building sub sets of feature set - most of which have some sort of dependancy; so to be sure (Safety Standards 61508 apply) the view is that the whole of the system needs to be tested as a unit - this then inevitably creates a bottlekneck at the end of the dev. cycle.

How does agile solve this situation ?

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Permalink Reply by Sina Jazayeri on July 20, 2010 at 3:46pm

This is very interesting - our scenario is similiar in that we have a mix of hardware and software to deal with, and use TDD and unit testing. We have developed automated tests that run on the target hardware, and these are excersized prior to release to valiation. Wiindows based test run on simulation platform as you say and run after every overnight build. Can you define Acceptance testing and how you automate it ? this is an area we are currently not good at and where I can see any effort would yeild high value.

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Permalink Reply by Urs Enzler on July 26, 2010 at 7:50pm

The software we build runs completely on Windows, the firmware we use does already exist.
Therefore our tests are automated using NUnit, NAnt and TeamCity.

We write Acceptance Test or Story Test with the same technology as the unit tests: NUnit. Whereas a unit tests checks a single unit (normally a class or small component), acceptance tests test for example from UI down to the database BUT the UI representation (and only the representation) and DB (persistent classes are just kept in memory and are not stored) are mocked. This way, these tests run very quickly and we can run them on every commit to the souce repository.

We experimented with complete system tests using Ranorex. Ranorex starts up the system, peforms some actions as a user would and checks visual results. However, these tests are hard to write, take long to run and our experience showed that they add little value to the acceptance tests. Therefore, we are not sure whether to continue or what parts of the system to test in this way.

Cheers,
Urs