Jonathan Kohl talks at length about the good and bad of the XP and Agile notions of software testing. Jonathan is a well known writer on software testing issues and has worked extensively as a tester on conventional software projects as well as scrum and extreme programming (XP) teams. He also shares his views on Ruby and the Ruby based Watir testing tool. Here are some key excerpts from the interview.

“XP notions of “100% test automation”, “no tester role”, etc. didn’t
always hold up when skilled software testing was applied on those projects”

Agile methods have some great things going on with regards to testing, but we’ve been set back by a lot of bad testing folklore that was rehashed under the “Agile Testing” banner in early writings. Sometimes ridiculous claims that software testers have heard for years were once again trotted out as “wisdom”, such as “manual tests are harmful”, or “every test must be automated”, or “testers are the Quality gatekeepers on a project”.

Recently, I’ve worked with more and more developers who were misled by the “Agile-Testing” folklore that automated unit testing encompasses software testing.

He also gives a nice quote about Ruby “I like to use Ruby because it works the way I think about programming in a scripting language. ”

You can read the full interview here: Agile teams miss out by having a narrow focus on testing

Related:
>> Test automation requires programming skills
>> Why pick JTiger Java Unit Testing Framework over good old JUnit
>> Let’s Use JUnit
>> Using Intelligent Test Automation Techniques
>> An Introduction to Software Test Automation
>> “Can automated testing replace all manual testing?” The answer is …

Written by Content Team on February 28, 2006      Print