Tester’s role in Agile

Thank you for all the responses and requests. This post is for all of them who have requested to share some more information on “Agile” projects as well as the tester's role in the project.

While working on different projects in Agile, I have understood that the testing skills required for agile projects are tested more with in very little time. In my previous post, we have seen the skills required for testing and now we will see how these skills are applied in Agile.

Communication

In agile testing, tester is a part of development team. He will be closely working with development team to help them improve quality of the deliverables. This is a critical task and required good communication. Usually communicating to the development team and communicating to agile team is different.

Agile manifesto - Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.

Agile teams are expected to work as one unit and hence the communication between each individual team member becomes paramount important.

Business Knowledge

Within team, most of the time development team rely on the tester for quality. In agile due to quick deliveries and shorten cycles development team expects that tester should provide good reasoning for any quality issues identified. Hence business knowledge required for tester to work in Agile is less important to none.

Technical Knowledge

As tester is closely working with developers and tester is a part of the team, it becomes essential that tester understands the technical discussions. Most of the time testers are exposed to all such technical discussion and then expected to provide some thoughts from improving quality. If tester is very well aware of the technology then it is very useful to help developers to understand the quick quality issues which may otherwise surface.

Issue Resolution

Sometimes in Agile developers are ready to fix the issues within given time if the issues are recognized early in development stage. Well experienced tester can point out issues in the functionalities, design or code and also have courage to explain it to the development team.  The tester helps team to make the demo successful for acceptance of the deliverables by product owner. Any issues if found should be recorded and should have a proper schedule for rework. The success of agile team depends on the tester and his involvement in issues resolution.

Automation

All the repetitive task should be automated at the earliest possible to utilize all the available time for process improvements and quality deliverables. Most of the time functional testers involved in the Agile with no or less automation appetite will results in time consuming testing process. The overall result is not so good which is otherwise possible. Automation can be as simple as checking if the environment is ready with the automated scripts rather than manually accessing the environment. Also running sanity scripts as soon as the code is deployed.

In Agile, testing is quite different than otherwise. Tester is individual contributor as well as responsible for team’s quality deliverable.

We will see more on testing in upcoming posts. Till then,   

Keep Agile!