Why Agile?

In today's highly competitive IT business, companies experience massive pressures to be as effective and efficient as possible in developing and delivering successful software solutions. If you don't find strategies to reduce the cost of software development, your competitors will, allowing them to undercut your prices, to offer to develop and deliver products faster, and ultimately to steal business from you.

Often in the past, testing was an afterthought; now it is increasingly seen as the essential activity in software development and delivery. However, poor or ineffective testing can be just as bad as no testing and may cost significant time, effort, and money, but ultimately fail to improve software quality, with the result that your customers are the ones who find and report the defects in your software!

If testing is the right thing to do, how can you ensure that you are doing testing right?

If you ask managers involved in producing software whether they follow industry best practices in their development and testing activities, almost all of them will confidently assure you that they do. The reality is often far less clear; even where a large formal process documenting best development and testing practice has been introduced into an organization, it is very likely that different members of the team will apply their own testing techniques, employ a variety of different documentation (such as their own copies of test plans and test scripts), and use different approaches for assessing and reporting testing progress on different projects.