Review By: Noreen K. Dertinger
06/13/2011"Agile Testing: How to Succeed in an Extreme Testing Environment" by John Watkins is a compact resource divided into three main parts and supporting appendices. Each section can be read on its own; together, the parts provide a general resource about agile development and testing.

In part one, “Review of Old-school and Agile Approaches,” Watkins reviews legacy testing practices such as waterfall, spiral, and iterative and then describes some of the key agile development and testing practices (such as rapid application development, Extreme Programming, Scrum, and others).

Parts two and three, “Everyone Is Different: Agile Case Studies” and “Agile My Way: A Proposal for Your Own Agile Process,” are the real heart of this book. Part two contains twenty real-world cases describing how different organizations and practitioners have worked with agile development and testing or, in some cases, implemented their own approach to agile. Each case study includes information about what the testing requirements, techniques used, successes achieved, and lessons learned—what could be improved or left out in the future. Part three provides a concise analysis of the case studies presented in part two. Watkins distills the material in the case studies to highlight agile techniques that are particularly successful and those that were less successful and should be approached with caution. Watkins makes proposals about how practitioners might set up their own agile testing practices and provides guidelines on how to successfully introduce, roll out, and manage the use of agile techniques within an organization.

The appendices provide more detail on the agile processes described in chapter three, “Agile Development and Testing,” as well as templates for an agile test script, an agile test result record, and an agile test report template and a checklist of agile best practices.

Agile Testing: How to Succeed in an Extreme Testing Environment will be of greater interest to managers who are looking for a high-level description of agile-related experiences of various organizations. Watkins does a good job of compiling and presenting the information provided by the participating organizations. His book will provide a good overview of things to avoid or consider.

While the book provides a very good overview, it is inadequate as a resource for testers looking for an in-depth reference on agile testing techniques. Test practitioners looking for a more detailed guide may wish to consider Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory, which was published in 2009, the same year as Watkins’s work. That said, anyone looking for an overview of and introduction to agile may find the case studies and analysis interesting to read.

The website cited in the book as the source of the appendices’ templates is no longer valid, the templates are straightforward enough that they can be quickly reproduced. To me, there was nothing that distinguished these templates as being specific to agile testing.

I would recommend this book to managers and those who wish to gain and overview of best agile development and testing processes.