24 - Analysis of the Case Studies

Summary

If you plan to run a test more than ten times, it's cost effective to automate it. If you don't automate it, it's unlikely that you'll run it more than once!

Jon Tilt

Introduction

This chapter examines in detail the agile case studies presented in Part 2, identifying particularly successful agile techniques, as well as those testing approaches that were not so successful and which may need to be treated with caution. The next chapter, Chapter 25, makes a number of proposals based on the analysis in this chapter for agile practices that you could reuse as part of the process of setting up your own agile method, while Chapter 26 provides a series of recommendations on how you might manage the roll-out and adoption of your agile method.

In addition to the case studies that made it into this book, I was lucky enough to have had offers of roughly the same number again, and I am very grateful to all those agile practitioners whose work helped to inform the material in this and the following chapters.

I have also been fortunate enough to be able to draw upon a rich vein of agile material from a number of other sources, including:

• my association with the British Computer Society Specialist Group in Software Testing (the BCS SIGiST), a number of whose members have been kind enough to submit agile cases studies;

• I am also indebted to those SIGiST members with whom I have discussed and corresponded with on the subject of agile testing and who have helped drive and define the material in this chapter;

• […]