Innovation, Agile and Test

It's a funny thing, we adopt new life-cycle methodologies, (such as Agile), to be current and to have a process that offers the most benefit, but we then go and implement it stifling our engineering practices in exactly the same way! What, you may ask, am I talking about - innovation! One of the things that tends to disappear when dealing with Agile, deadlines, and tough deliveries, (at least in my experience) is innovation - the freedom to try new things in new ways with new technologies - little explorations into the unknown. This phenomena is mostly associated with development, about not being able to take risks that might fail with new technologies, designs etc etc, but I think to end the association of innovation at the developer level is wrong, and undersells the importance of testing, That's right, I said testing and innovation in the same sentence! Things have come a long way since the days of fully manually teams of testers waiting to get delivery of a product so they can test it. We now have test occurring at all stages of the product life-cycle, unit testing, integration testing, acceptance testing manual testing, automated UI testing, automated under the UI testing, the list goes on. The point is though, that none of this testing would happen if we weren't innovating in the testing of our products as well as the development of. Which brings be to point already made, in that we tend to stifle our processes, pushing innovation out in favour of predictable and functional features, and as many as we can fit in a release cycle as possible. I look around at some of the testing and technology blogs produced by some of the big names in the software business, Google, Amazon, Microsoft etc and find myself getting innovation envy - I see them implementing cool and useful new things and find myself wondering not how it works, but how they found the time to invest. So if a) I have any readers and b) they have some ideas on idea creation and implementation, I would be very pleased to hear them.