Test Automation Pyramid

An important question that we need to answer is what types of testing will we need to perform while building our solution? Figure 1 depicts the test automation pyramid. The test automation pyramid indicates the various levels of testing our team will need to consider. Exploratory testing is depicted as a cloud because it can occur at any time and at any level. Note that some people consider exploratory testing, the act of probing a solution to see if it behaves in unexpected ways, to be the only true form of testing. When we are manually following a test script, or when we are running automated regression tests, then these “tests” are really checks that we run to ensure that the solution still works as expected. For the sake of simplicity, in Disciplined Agile (DA) we still refer to all of this work as testing (as opposed to testing and checking).