[IxDA Discuss] Interaction Design and QA

[Jim Drew]

>From: "McCarthy, Ann Marie" <amccarthy at Kronos.com>
>
>I'm working as an interaction designer in an agile development
>organization. We're making significant changes to the u.i. across a
>broad suite of products. Part of the process is to have QA run the code
>through automated tests. Some of the design is difficult to validate in
>testing--the styling of a button or the behavior of tabs, for example.
>Does anyone have experience in working successfully with QA in this
>environment?

I've done the QA side on semi-agile projects  in the past.

The biggest problem you'll run into there is that in such environments, the UI design isn't typically set in stone by the time the developers put it together and hand it off to QA.  It's hard enough for QA to "black box" test look and feel and usability of an environment going through agile-type changes on a regular basis.  Asking them to automate that... no, no, no.

Automated testing tends to only work well in a stable environment.  Every change that comes in causes a cascade of "something's changed, look at it, evaluate it, post a bug or revise the tests".  If your UI is going to be changing with every build, the automated tests never get to land on something stable enough to create a baseline from.  I think you're just asking for headaches, trying to do that sort of testing in that sort of environment.

-- Jim Drew
   Seattle, WA