Agile software development practices are now so widespread that they are no longer considered 'extreme'. However, many organisations and agile teams still struggle with how to do successful testing on an agile development project.

This tutorial introduces the key principles of agile development with a particular focus on the quality and testing aspects. We illustrate why agile projects present a radical shift from traditional 'waterfall' project plans and divisions of labour, and show why this requires a complete rethink of the way software is tested. We explain what it means for a project to be truly 'test-driven', where the testers take a 'lead' rather than a 'lag' role in the development cycle. Students will learn how to use different testing techniques to provide comple-mentary risk mitigation and test coverage on agile projects.

The tutorial also gives students practical exposure to a number of open-source testing tools popular in agile teams, such as FIT, FitNesse, Nunit and Selenium.

Topics covered include: Shaping an Agile Testing strategy; Understanding the range of QA activities in agile projects; Test-Driven Development with .NET and NUnit; Defining requirements and tests with FitNesse; Automated Acceptance Testing with FIT; Exploratory Testing; Web GUI testing with Selenium