Agile testers – Next generation of testers

We have adopted agile methodology in some years now and this has changed the role of our testers along with changing the other areas of the business. Before agile adoption, were having roles like test engineer,
lead tester, team leader and test manger. Now we only have test engineers in every

agile team. I call them test analysts.

Test analysts in each team are involved more from beginning to end. Tester’s activities are now like below:

1. Involve in the visioning process of the user story. This is very important because
   the test analyst is now a stakeholder not just the tester.

2. As team member estimate the user story before they are prioritised.

3. Once the user stories are prioritised and ready to be elaborated, which will
   result into defining acceptance criteria, the testers will have to play their
   part in defining the acceptance criteria. I have put my colleagues to
   understand requirements better. This has resulted in having testers
   writing user stories and helping our BAs.

4. Plan the tests around acceptance criteria before the user story is played; this
   should be just the bullets points not a very heavy process. Also, identify
   any performance impact on the application we are expecting.

5. When the user story is kicked off for development, testers need to be with the
   developer along with the BA to go though the story (I call these people as
   story team). A tester needs to have a conversation around how he is going
   to verify the acceptance criteria. This also includes going thought the
   user story test plan which the testes have created to verify the user
   story. By doing this, I have found there are less bug being slipped though
   in the integration testing. Also, this has helped us put quality into the
   developer’s mind. It is really working very well for us.

6. The small story team will go thought the story again once the development is
   complete. Once the team is happy, the story is development complete. A
   build number is obtained normally at the end of this task.

7. Tester/ or any other member will deploy the build into to integration and verify
   the user story as per test plan.

8. Testers also involve in the user story show case to the business or to the
   potential users.

9. Run some regression tests to verify every thing else is working in the
   integration environment. If the build we have to regression test is a candidate
   release, we need to do a performance test to see if there is any performance
   impact on the application.

10. Release team will release the software into pre-live/live environment and the
    tester will run a small regression test again.

11. The tester will review or analyse the software with the business and customer in
    live.

Tests are also some time scrum masters. They can do what they are asked to. We have some team where testers are developing acceptance tests. It all works well if you step up as a tester to agile testers.

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