Effective Testing Techniques for Untold Stories in Story-Driven Development

摘要

Feature crews (teams) take a few stories and implement them as part of story-driven development in each sprint. The goal, at the end of each sprint, is to demonstrate and complete the customer experience along the stories designed. This is a great software development methodology proving the software being built can deliver the customer experience. However, story-driven development brings unique challenges for software testing. As stories are implemented, relying on each other, a complex software system emerges capable of doing more than just the stories told. With the addition of each story, testing surface and capabilities (and defects) of the software grow exponentially. This paper describes various techniques developed and used over several releases through experiments in testing within agile development by the Visualization & Modeling Tools team for Visual Studio Ultimate. It also presents a case study to illustrate and emphasize key points, ranging from using architecture diagrams as part of test planning to particular test coverage along with test spectrum range. The guidance presented here focuses around a set of best practices that teams can adopt to accomplish optimal test coverage over the test spectrum.