In our oppinion it is impossible to practice the SCRUM process without automating your tests, this article gives a preview into why we believe this to be the case. Contact us to learn more.

Introduction

The sore spot in most projects developed using the SCRUM methodology has always been the acceptance tests.

Wide industry adoption of SCRUM at the moment

The entire software industry is moving to SCRUM, so there is every reason to consider how testing and SCRUM should fit together. Especially if your organization is considering making the jump.

How do they do it?

Everyone agrees that acceptance testing is crucial to SCRUM, but there is precious little material about how it is done. Especially for embedded systems.

Current situation

It is not apparent how companies handles acceptance testing under SCRUM now, there are at least three possible scenarios:

No testing takes place

This is obviously a bad idea, you might be inventing new features quickly, but you are doing so at a break-neck pace. You have no way to ensure that the work is done and that the previous work still functions correctly.

Unit testing only

At CIM we agree whole-heartedly that you can get tremendous value from unit testing, unit testing is understood by both almost all software developers and, as such, it is easy to implement.

But unit testing does not cover the entire system of tests, far from it, in fact, some people say that acceptance testing is more important unit testing.

Manual acceptance testing

Some organizations does manual acceptance testing as part of a sprint, usually the last part, but only test the new functionality. The previous functionality is just assumed to keep on working without having any tests to back it up.

You could do manual acceptance testing of all previous work items each time a new work item is implemented, but pretty soon you would spend all your time doing manual testing instead of implementing new work items.

Automation is a clear solution to this problem.

Solution using SeqZap

SeqZap provides a standard and pragmatic solution to the problem of getting acceptance testing included in your SCRUM process.

Most of our customers can be split into two groups:

• Those who are using SeqZap as the missing piece of the puzzle in their SCRUM process (acceptance testing).
• Those who are confident enough to start doing SCRUM after they have seen that the acceptance test can actually be automated using SeqZap.

If you are considering using SCRUM for your next project, or are stuck in a SCUM project which seems to have slowed down, we suggest you start looking at your acceptance test.

And when you reach the realization that automation is the way to go, just contact us and we will help you reach your goals.