Chapter 13. Defining and Estimating Testing and Test Infrastructure Tasks

As the first iteration gets underway, you're helping the programmers clarify details in the stories with the customer, looking for assumptions that may blow up the story estimate and require reshuffling of the iteration, raising questions about usually overlooked tasks, and generally holding everyone's feet to the fire for accurate estimates. But (to quote the late-night gadget commercials) that's not all! You also need to identify and estimate (as accurately as possible) the tasks associated with testing and test infrastructure that are your primary responsibility.

Don't be scared off by our geeky-sounding term test infrastructure. We aren't after a heavyweight infrastructure here. We simply mean that to help your team move at maximum speed, you need a stable test environment and some means of automating tests, capturing test results, and leveraging automated tests. The test infrastructure can be built incrementally: build what you need when you need it. We've had the unfortunate experience of working on projects that, at least in the first few iterations, had no environment apart from the development environment in which to do acceptance testing. Your project team probably won't succeed in delivering acceptable software without an independent test environment and some means of automating the tests.