Preface

This is a book about being a tester on an Extreme Programming (XP) team. It plugs a gap in the currently available XP materials by defining how an XP tester can contribute to the project, including what testers should do, when they should do it, and how they should do it. We wrote it because we think XP is a better way to develop software and that more teams should use it. We believe an acknowledged place in XP teams for testing and quality assurance will help bring that about.

Our goals in this book are to

• Convince current XP practitioners that a tester has a valid role on the team

• Convince testing and quality assurance professionals that XP offers solutions to some of their worst problems

• Convince both groups that testers are needed just as much in an XP project as in a traditional development project

• Provide enough detail and practical example to allow you to either perform the XP tester role yourself or work productively with a tester on your team, whether you're an XP newbie or veteran, tester, programmer, guide, customer, or manager

We hope that if you're not currently using XP, you can influence your organization to try it. Even if your team uses some other process for software development, we think you can apply "extreme testing" practices to add value.

Because not everyone will be familiar with XP, we provide an overview of the basic concepts in the introduction and describe a few aspects in more detail as necessary throughout the text. But this will be a bare-bones summary, at best. We list several excellent books on the subject in the bibliography, and a wealth of information is available on the Web.

The book is divided into three major sections:

Part I: The XP Tester Role

This is where we define what we think the tester role is (and is not), how a project will benefit from it, what's in it for the tester, and generally why XP needs a tester role.

Part II: Test Drive through an XP Project

Here we navigate an XP project step by step and suggest what goals to shoot for, which activities to engage in, and helpful techniques to try as a tester on an XP project.

Part III: Road Hazard Survival Kit

Finally, we provide some resources to help you cope when the real world doesn't conform to the ideal XP project: large projects, for instance, where an XP team is embedded in a larger, non-XP effort or when critical XP practices are modified or omitted.

We've tried to keep things as practical as possible and have provided real-life examples. We've also included exercises, so you can try the ideas out for yourself. The exercises are built around an XP project to develop a simple Web-based tracking application. We provide portions of the application at various stages for you to practice on.

We think you'll find this book helpful if you're already a member of an XP team, if you're a testing/quality assurance professional, or if you're in any software development role and are considering XP.

Lisa Crispin
Tip House
June 2002