Chapter 1: Introduction

If a team believes they are agile, but nothing has changed about the way they test, then there is still much to learn. We teach 5 key principles that explain why agile testing is fundamentally different to traditional testing.

This books includes a collection of workshops to help teams grasp these principles and adopt an agile testing mindset. It’s not just for testers. A key part of agile testing is that the whole team is involved, so we always run these workshops with everyone in the team.

If your team is ready for the next level we highly recommend running through the workshops in this book, it will teach them a number of simple but valuable techniques to help prevent bugs and dramatically increase the quality of your products. We provide the facilitation plans, teaching points, and even the slides you might use to help you run the workshop.

The chapters in this book each relate to a different topic on agile testing. You can use the book in a number of ways.

• You could use all the chapters together to deliver a half or full day training course on Agile Testing. This is usually how we run the workshops, and so many chapters build on things done in the previous chapter.
• You can use an individual chapter to run a workshop session on a particular topic of interest. We recommend doing the Agile Mindset first as it is reinforced in the rest of the chapters.

For each chapter, you can expand the learning by using the technique just taught on items the team are currently working with.

Unlike our previous book on Training Scrum, we don’t assume you are an expert on the topics in this book. Not every coach and trainer have come across the same tools. If a topic is new to you, we have provided details of the points we teach for each topic in the C2 section.

You only need the standard training kit mentioned in How to use this Series to run most of the workshops in this book. However, if you plan to run the Jenga game mentioned in the Getting Started chapter, you will also need a few Jenga sets. Two sets are enough for up to 18 people.

Since testing and requirements are closely linked together we recommend our Agile Requirements book (part of the series) as a good companion to this one.