In this quite long blog I’ll tell you how I approach agile projects and why I think it is the right way. In short my idea is very simple – I do write down „the test ideas” at the very beginning of the project, while developers are doing the initial work and I have nothing to test yet. I analyze whatever information is available and ask for more to do that. When I’m done with the list I save it and forget about it. I test ignoring it. It’s sometimes late in the project when I dig it up to wonder how much of the ideas are covered. A lot of them does not make sense any more, others are somewhat covered, but I keep discovering that quite a lot of things I have missed – and I discover more bugs that I would otherwise missed. Why? In a hurry, testing one feature after another I’ve missed the big picture – that’s why.

This state machine diagram from the Python source code (client.py in Python 3, httplib.py in Python 2) is useful for understanding the different states of a client/server connection via HTTP: