Agile testing strategies

From: Dr Dobbs Portal

An article about different approaches to testing on agile development projects. The philosophy outlined is:

1. First, you want to test as early as you possibly can because the potential impact of a defect rises exponentially over time (this isn’t always true, but it’s something to be concerned about). In fact, many agile developers prefer a test-first approach.
2. Second, you want to test as often as possible, and more importantly, as effectively as possible, to increase the chance that you’ll find defects. Although this increases your costs in the short term, studies have shown that greater investment in testing reduces the total cost of ownership of a system due to improved quality.
3. Third, you want to do just enough testing for your situation: Commercial banking software requires a greater investment in testing than membership administration software for your local Girl Scouts group.
4. Fourth, pair testing, just like pair programming and modeling with others, is an exceptionally good idea. My general philosophy is that software development is a lot like swimming—it’s very dangerous to do it alone.