Agile Testing Terms and Definitions
Not a CTFL v4.0 chapter — its content lives in chapters 1, 2, 4 and 5. This page gathers those threads in one place.
32 terms in this topic
About this topic
Source: ISTQB Certified Tester Agile Tester (CTFL-AT) and CTFL v4.0
Agile testing is not a chapter of the CTFL v4.0 syllabus — its content was distributed into chapters 1, 2, 4, and 5. This page pulls those threads back together, so every term here also belongs to a syllabus chapter and appears there too.
Agile development changes testing's timing and ownership rather than its principles. Testing moves from a phase to a continuous activity, and quality becomes a whole-team responsibility rather than a separate group's. Short iterations mean the regression suite is re-run constantly, which makes automation a practical necessity rather than an optimisation.
The collaboration-based approaches in CTFL v4.0 chapter 4 are where agile practice is examined most directly. Collaborative user story writing brings business, development, and testing perspectives together so ambiguity surfaces before code is written. Acceptance criteria make a user story testable. Acceptance test-driven development turns those criteria into executable tests before implementation begins — a defect-prevention technique, not a detection one. Test-driven development and behaviour-driven development apply the same test-first idea at different levels.
Planning and management practices from chapter 5 appear here too. Planning poker structures relative estimation. The test pyramid describes the shape a sustainable automated suite should take — many fast unit tests beneath progressively fewer slower ones. The testing quadrants classify tests by whether they support the team or critique the product, and whether they face the business or the technology.
Exploratory testing and session-based testing fit agile well because they produce useful feedback quickly without requiring stable, fully specified requirements — but note they are chapter 4 techniques in their own right, not agile-specific inventions.
What this topic covers
- Whole-team approach
- Collaborative user story writing
- ATDD, TDD and BDD
- Planning poker
- Test pyramid and testing quadrants
- Continuous integration and shift left
Terms in Agile Testing
Tap any term to read its full definition and examples.
32 terms
- acceptance criteria
- acceptance test-driven development
- agile manifesto
- agile software development
- agile test leader
- agile test team leader
- behavior-driven development
- built-in quality
- collaboration-based test approach
- continuous integration
- continuous testing
- epic
- exploratory testing
- feature-driven development
- incremental development model
- iterative development model
- pair testing
- planning poker
- quality coaching
- retrospective
- session-based testing
- shift left
- shift right
- specification by example
- test charter
- test pyramid
- test-driven development
- test-first approach
- testing in production
- testing quadrants
- user story
- user story testing
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