Commandants of Agile Methodology

1.Satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
2.Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage.
3.Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter time scale.
4.Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
5.Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
6.The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
7.Working software is the primary measure of progress.
8.Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.

9.Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
10.Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential.
11.The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
12.At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

Effective Web Application Testing Process

The Key attributes required for the Effective Web Testing Process are:

1. Clarity: For a process to be effective, steps within the process and the results of the process need to be easily understood by all relevant stakeholders.
2. Repeatability and Portability: For a process to be control with any economies of scale, it must be repeatable. Applications change, versions change, personnel change, but a good process can be learned by new team members and adapted to new situations.
3. Transparency: An effective process must be transparent, both to members of the team involved in the day-to-day operations within the process as well as to "outsiders" (such as management, business analysts, etc.) who need to have a view into the process for the purposes of aligning its results with other processes (such as PR and Operations, among others) within the organization.
4.Persistence: The process must create outputs that are not destroyed at the end of the process. In a testing environment such outputs will be documentation, test plans, test results, and defects found. This information should be stored in a centralized repository accessible by both team members and a variety of "outsiders," such as Marketing staff who are coordinating public launches, senior management who are evaluating the effectiveness of their business units.

Total Process Improvement - TPI - Test in a new way

TPI (Test Process Improvement Model) is a model which aims to aid in measuring the testing process maturity and also provides guidelines for improvements. Developed by Sogeti Nederland BV, it classifies the entire testing process into 20 key areas. It gives an approach wherein an organization can self assess the level at which it is in each of the 20 key areas. There are a maximum of 4 levels (A, B, C, D) for each of the key areas with A being the least and D the highest.
The manager can define a target required level for each of the areas. All key areas need not be at the same level. TPI also offers a set of improvement guidelines on how one could improves one’s process to a higher level for each of the areas. To reach a particular level there is a checkpoint which contains the set of requirements that the particular key area must satisfy to achieve that level.
There is a final maturity matrix which captures the levels and interdependencies between each of the key areas. Each of the rows of the matrix is a key area. The columns of the matrix are the maturity levels. There are 13 levels of maturity. Not all key areas at a given level map to a given level of maturity. For example if Test Strategy is at level A then the maturity for it is only 1 while if key area metrics is at level A the maturity is level 6. This is because all key areas do not have the same priority. In addition the 13 maturity stages are mapped into 3 categories: 1-5 is Controlled, 6-10 is Efficient and 11-13 is Optimizing.