I recently revisited the Agile Manifesto and the twelve principles of agile software. When I searched for the words test and quality, I found, much to my surprise, that they were not mentioned in either. What does this mean? Surely the original signatories of the Agile Manifesto had to have quality in mind when they met. Didn’t they?
As usual I had to dig deeper into the agile world and its relationship to quality control or testing to see if they can really coexist. I immediately found two videos on YouTube about agile and testing. Both were awesome—if you have time to watch them. This proves that there is a market and a desire to incorporate testing in agile.
As I continued my investigation into agile and testing, I was curious about some of the signatories of the Agile Manifesto and their views on testing. Had they simply forgotten to include quality or did they just think that it was implied? I Googled Kent Beck and quality assurance and found the answer. Beck had this to say about quality:
If you deliberately downgrade quality, your team might go faster at first, but soon the demoralization of producing crap will overwhelm any gains you temporarily made from not testing, or not reviewing, or not sticking to standards.
Keep in mind that Kent Beck was the first signer of the Agile Manifesto.
Next, I Googled Jim Highsmith, another signer of the Agile Manifesto, and found his thoughts on testing and quality. I then Googled fellow Agile Manifesto signer Ken Schwaber and discovered his blog where he also discusses quality and testing. So here we have three of the signers of the Agile Manifesto discussing their thoughts on quality and testing, but yet there is no mention of the terms in the Agile Manifesto.
Why did they do this? They mention working software, technical excellence, and good design; maybe they felt this implied quality and testing. My questions to the original signers are these: Why did you fail to mention testing and quality? Was this an oversight or was there a deeper reason for the omissions?
This a question in an exam I had once. I didn't know the correct answer and I still don't.
Well as you can tell no signatory ever responded either. Personally I think its implied as no one with any IT experience would think that quality or testing is not necessary, even though CM and Testing are usually the first to go in budget cuts at most companies.