In Agile model of development, the focus is on decomposing the problem into small user stories and delivering it. This implies means that we are decomposing complexity and thereby demystifying it. An user story is like a “sutra” – an aphorism, that needs to be delved into detail to understand its entirety. And this is needed if you want to test well. Questioning is a key activity to dig into the details as the typical documentation of user story is condensed. Most often the functional complexity of an user story is low, with the challenge being understanding the behaviour of interactions with other stories, environment and the non-functional aspects.
“Sutras” are powerful, as they communicate deep stuff in a few words. To understand the deep stuff, intense questioning is key. Therefore in the Agile context, testing is therefore not anymore an act of evaluation post coding, it is about intense questioning to “sensitise and & prevent defects” rather than “design & execute test cases”.
Agile is the implementation of ‘Lean Thinking’, whose primary objective is to be value adding and least wasteful. So the focus is not about detection of issues only, rather it is about intense questioning to find issues early enough so that they do not find their way into code i.e PREVENT.