Skip to main content

Role of a Tester in an Agile Team

Tester in agile is no different from that of traditional tester but in agile, he has to play multiple roles apart from just testing the software. In this post, we are going to discuss about the role of a tester in a project following a scrum life cycle.
To make a project successful, testing plays a vital role. In agile, the main idea is whole team approach where testers, developers and business representatives work together as a team. Below are some of the main roles or best practices followed by team members in an agile (Scrum) environment:




  1. Cross-Functional: Every team has team members with a specific skill set which they bring to the table. The team work together on Test strategy, Test plan, Test execution and evaluation. Quality is a shared responsibility. 
  2. Self-Organizing: There are no leads in Agile. Team is self organized, meaning every team member knows and understands his responsibility and work accordingly. 
  3. Co-located: In most of the cases, testers, developers and product owner sit together to plan the project iterations. They are located in the same area. 
  4. Collaborative: Tester has to collaborate with different teams, namely, stake holders, developers, product owner and scrum master. This is a whole team approach where communication is the key to success. 
  5. Empowered: When it comes to taking decisions, whole team is involved whether it is related to design or testing. Testers, developers and scrum master collaborate with product owner and other teams if need arises. 
  6. Committed: Tester should be committed to analyze the software behavior according to the expected functionality and should ask questions whenever needed. He should know the users and customers and test the software accordingly.
  7. Transparent: Every team member knows what other team member is doing. Every task and progress is visible on the Agile task board. 
  8. Credible: Tester should take the credibility of the test strategy and the process to gain the trust of stakeholders. This can be done by being transparent about the testing process and keeping stakeholders informed about the strategies.
  9. Open to Feedback: Retrospective meetings are conducted after every iteration to make sure that we learn from our failures and successes. Tester should always be open to feedback and work on them.
  10. Resilient: Tester should know how to accommodate changes in testing when a requirement gets change. 
These were 10 major roles of a tester in an agile project. I have referred these from the syllabus of ISTQB Agile Foundation level certification extension.



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Benefits of Early and Frequent Feedback in Agile development

One of the reasons why Agile is preferred over traditional development method is "Early and Frequent Customer Feedback". This is not only helps customer to get what he wants but also helps development team to understand the requirement better. There is no room for misunderstandings and delays. so no BAD CUSTOMER SERVICE! In this post, I am going to discuss about some of the major benefits of early and frequent feedback in Agile. One way to get the early feedback is "CI" or Continuous Integration. There are many tools available in the market like Jenkins which help in running automated tests when a change is introduced in the build and give the feedback on the build performance or quality. Below are some of the advantages of early and frequent feedback: Early and regular feedback helps in clearing out the misunderstanding of the requirements. Unlike in traditional method, fixing the issues or requirements change is a lot less expensive. Customer get to see the...

Remove Blanks from Excel Sheet when Excel doesn't recognize field as blank

This is one of the tricks which always helped me in removing the blank fields from an Excel sheet especially when the values are copied from other sources. I have added screenshots of a sample data to show you all the actions step by step. Here are the steps to remove blanks by using one of the special functions in excel: 1. Select your data-set (Select the column which has blank values) 2. Press F5 3. Select "Special". You will see below screen: 4.Select Blanks and click Ok as shown 5. All the blank fields are now selected, you can proceed and delete all of them by selecting "delete" from the home menu.   Here is the final result: I hope this was helpful. Share this with your colleagues and friends to help them out.

All About Continuous Integration in Agile

In my last post,  Benefits of Early and Frequent Feedback in Agile development  I mentioned how Continuous Integration helps in early and frequent feedback. In this post, we are going to go deeper into the concept and see what exactly it does, how it does and its benefits and challenges. Continuous Integration is an automated system which wraps configuration management, software build, deployment and testing into one repeatable process. The best practice is to run the whole set of set into the new build (with all the new code check ins) at least once a day. This gives a feedback on the  build quality. If all the automated tests passed then the build can be used to perform deeper testing. Below are some of the activities carried out by CI: Code analysis Compilation of code and generating an executable file Perform Unit testing Deploying the build onto the testing environment Performing integration testing Generating reports In our project, nightly build and...