Holistic Testing: Effective strategies for agile teams

Many “agile” teams still struggle with delivering good-enough-quality software in a timely manner and find themselves dragged down by production bugs. They haven’t mastered core practices that let them build quality into software. They can’t get traction on test automation, and don’t have time for important testing activities such as exploratory testing. They have no idea how to start an observability practice. Continuous delivery and DevOps culture seem like unachievable goals.

If you’re finding it hard to succeed with any aspect of testing with your team, join us to get traction on what it means to incorporate holistic testing into your work habits. Adopting a holistic view to testing, means helping your team tackle tough challenges such as automating, collaborating for testing in a cross-functional team, and building what your customer really wants. We use a case study to work through the holistic testing model using hands-on exercises.

You’ll learn core practices such as guiding development with business-facing tests, exploratory testing techniques, and how to mitigate risks by testing the right quality attributes. Part of your testing strategy means incorporating human-centric testing activities as well as automation to your deployment pipeline. We explore a few tools to help visualize that strategy.

We end with learning how to design an experiment to continually improve your testing, so by the end of the day, you’ll have a full testing toolbox and a list of experiments to help your team build quality software and think testing from a holistic viewpoint.