Testing in Agile World

It’s a very common thing to see testers wait for the end of development cycle to start testing. That’s not a right tactic of course but there are still many examples of teams functioning according to this logic. In some cases testers’ testing environment is not updated, in some other cases developers are not pushing their work to testable environment, and there are many other issues happening in some teams. Testing could have been considered as merely a phase in the past, but nowadays testing is a set of activities.
It’s very important to understand tester’s real role in agile teams. It’s not only finding bugs and issues! The role of tester in agile teams is being the guardian of quality, and to make sure that quality remains top priority for the developers, Product Owners and Scrum Masters.

In order to have quality in agile workflow, the team should:

Design a plan: To do this, there everyone should be open to communicate: developers, testers, and all the stakeholders. Product should be testable, valuable. Lack of communication can bring up many inappropriate questions, like “Have we done testing?” instead of “is the risk of the release acceptable?”

Automate: Automate simple checks that usually take time for checking multiple times.  Automate tasks that enable you understand whether the release will turn out to be as planned. Automated checks will save your time on checking bad releases many times. Automation will accelerate the process. If development is just starting and team implements automation, it will take less resources, than from the middle of development.

Exploratory test: It’s a very common mistake to think if automated checks pass for 100%, that guarantees 100% of the use cases. Exploratory testing is really having subject matter experts test end-to-end scenarios. They will test for user experience, test for usability, and they need to provide quick feedback. Exploratory testing is one of the most important parts of testing, because it gives an analytical individual the time to go through the site and think of all kinds of odd scenarios that others might not have thought of.

Unit test: We already talked about checks that developers write, to make sure that their code works correct and after every new code they’ll be sure that new code didn’t affect old one.

Team members should understand that they need to update their skills and always continue learning in order to find best solutions for issues that they need to solve. It doesn’t matter they’re seniors or just starting on their career path, everyone can find new things to learn and experiment.