Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams

Projects succeed when good people are allowed to do their best work. Agile values and principles were created with the aim of enabling individual and team success. Agile team members should feel safe and not have to worry about being blamed for mistakes or losing their jobs. Agile team members respect each other and recognize individual accomplishments. Everyone on an agile team should have opportunities to grow and develop their skills. Agile teams work at a sustainable pace that lets them follow disciplined practices and keep a fresh perspective. As the Agile Manifesto states, we value individuals and interactions over processes and tools.

In the history of software development, testers haven’t always enjoyed parity with other roles on the development team. Some people saw testers as failed programmers or second-class citizens in the world of software development. Testers who don’t bother to learn new skills and grow professionally contribute to the perception that testing is low-skilled work. Even the term “tester” has been avoided, with job titles such as “Quality Assurance Engineer” or “Quality Analyst” and team names such as “QA Department” given preference.

Agile teams that adhere to the true agile philosophy give all team members equal weight. Agile testers know they contribute unique value to their teams, and development teams have found they are more successful when their team includes people with specific testing skills and background. For example, a skilled exploratory tester may discover issues in the system that couldn’t be detected by automated functional tests. Someone with deep testing experience might ask important questions that didn’t occur to team members without testing experience. Testing knowledge is one component of any team’s ability to deliver value.

Enjoy

Working on a team where everyone collaborates, where you are engaged in the project from start to finish, where business stakeholders work together with the development team, where the whole team takes responsibility for quality and testing, in our opinion, is nothing short of a tester’s Utopia. We’re not alone in believing that everyone should find joy in their work. Agile development rewards the agile tester’s passion for her work.

Our jobs as agile testers are particularly satisfying because our viewpoint and skills let us add real value to our teams. In the next section, we’ll explore how.

Adding Value

What do these principles bring to the team? Together, they bring business value. In agile development, the whole team takes responsibility for delivering high-quality software that delights customers and makes the business more profitable. This, in turn, brings new advantages for the business.

Team members wear many hats, and agile development tends to avoid classifying people by specialty. Even with short iterations and frequent releases, it’s easy to develop a gap between what the customer team expects and what the team delivers. Using tests to drive development helps to prevent this, but you still need the right tests.

Agile testers not only think about the system from the viewpoint of stakeholders who will live with the solution but they also have a grasp of technical constraints and implementation details that face the development team. Programmers focus on making things work. If they’re coding to the right requirements, customers will be happy. Unfortunately, customers aren’t generally good at articulating their requirements. Driving development with the wrong tests won’t deliver the desired outcome. Agile testers ask questions of both customers and developers early and often, and help shape the answers into the right tests.

Agile testers take a much more integrated, team-oriented approach than testers on traditional waterfall projects. They adapt their skills and experience to the team and project. A tester who views programmers as adversaries, or sits and waits for work to come to her, or expects to spend more time planning than doing, is likely to cling to skills she learned on traditional projects and won’t last long on an agile team.

Peril: You’re Not “Really” Part of the Team

If you’re a tester, and you’re not invited to attend planning sessions, stand-ups, or design meetings, you might be in a situation where testers are viewed as somehow apart from the development team. If you are invited to these meetings but you’re not speaking up, then you’re probably creating a perception that you aren’t really part of the team. If business experts are writing stories and defining requirements all by themselves, you aren’t participating as a tester who’s a member of an agile team.