Towards Understanding Quality Assurance in Agile Software Development
چکیده
Agile software development stresses individuals and interaction, customer collaboration, short development cycles and frequent deliveries of valuable software. From the testing and quality assurance viewpoint these principles are challenging, and agile methods seem to lack aspects that traditionally are considered important and fundamental to successful quality assurance. In this paper we identify these theoretical challenges and shortcomings in agile methods. We describe the quality assurance practices of four agile methods and show that agile methods emphasise constructive quality building practices. Quality evaluating practices, based on a destructive attitude, are few, if any. We think that agile development processes could benefit from the introduction of additional testing practices, and as examples of such practices we propose the role of an independent tester and the session-based exploratory testing approach.