Appreciating testing in agile development

Agile development method s are gaining on popularity , because software are becoming more complex and the time to market has to be short as possible. The quality of the developed software must meet the desired quality level, consequently testing activities are necessary to reach a certain quality level. Since testing is a vital part of software development it has to cope with the agile methods. Therefore, the goal of this study is to identify how testing can be optimized with in the agile methodology of Scrum. In order to identify possible improvements, four research questions have been defined. Based on detailed literature review and on SWOT analysis of two current Scrum projects at the Swiss retail financial institution PostFinance, 16 improvements for testing were identified. These recommendations are grouped by organisational , Scrum events, Scrum artefacts as well as test execution improvements. To identify the impact of these recommendations , ten selected and applicable improvements were tested during a Sprint of each Scrum project. The outcome of these improvements were evaluated by determining their impact on the related weaknesses and threats of these projects by observations and interviews with the involved Scrum testers . In general it can be stated that these improvements had a positive impact on testing activities in the agile methodology Scrum.