Information and communications technology is big business. According to the National Science Board, global output from information technology (IT) industries more than doubled, from $1.2 trillion in 1995 to $2.8 trillion in 2010, accounting for six percent of global gross domestic product (GDP) [1]. IT industries are fast-growing, major contributors to job creation and innovation. It is not surprising that innovation in the development of IT systems would be nurtured and mature in this context. The use of agile methodologies is one such innovation and is the topic of this book.

This is the authors’ second book on this topic. The introduction states that the second book may be read without benefit of having read their first book, Agile testing. The intended readership of the book is any agile team member interested in testing, which may include testers, test managers, programmers, product owners, business analysts, line managers, and dev-ops practitioners.

The book begins with an acknowledgement of the 44 contributors from the IT industry, primarily from the professional IT test community. The book was written by weaving the two authors’ experiences and observations in agile testing into the collection of anecdotes from the 44 contributors. The anecdotes are set apart in the text inside grayed text boxes. This creates a visual separation that improves readability. If the anecdotes were also numbered with a listing of the titles, it would provide a means to reference observations concerning specific aspects of agile testing.

The usual approaches associated with agile of Scrum, extreme programming (XP), or the dynamic systems development method (DSDM) are not integrated into the descriptions of the approaches that the authors identify as agile test approaches. Their approaches include technologies; continuous integration (CI); development approaches; test-driven development (TDD); behavior-driven development (BDD); pair programming; a whole-team approach to quality; types of tests, such as specification by example (SBE); and guiding development with customer-facing examples, as in acceptance-test-driven development (ATDD). An explanation of how agile testing might vary under these different approaches would be of value to organizations.

The book contains 486 pages, organized into eight parts with 25 chapters. Part 8, “What Is Your Context?” has six chapters that consist of 105 pages. This section of the book takes specific contexts, including enterprise IT systems, mobile and embedded systems, data warehouses and business intelligence, and dev-ops, and presents an in-depth description of agile testing under these conditions. The chapters include more detail and an environmental context for domain-specific or technology-dependent approaches, which provide the reader with more accessible and useful information. The book also provides the reader with a glossary, references, bibliography, and index; these are all helpful tools when using the book as a reference for agile testing in practice.

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