If you are working in scrum and you don’t know what you need to do, then this is the right article for you. Here I will share my experiences and hopefully it’ll help you learn some new ideas to adopt and implement for the tester in the Agile scrum.
In scrum, you’re initially a test analyst who is trying to gain more knowledge about the product, technology involved in it, architecture overview and the main business components to deliver in sprint by sprint. As a tester, you need to jump deep into the assessment of possible test automation tools, scripting needed to be done, where you can report bugs, what are the best possible test cases, how many of them can be automated initially and developing a regression test automation plan with an acceptance criteria baseline.
Scrum Tester Mission
- Get involved from day one & listen: Assemble a team of scrum masters, product owners, designers & developer team ( architecture team ) where they can play poker. This will allow you to get product vision from product owner. You also get to learn the core technology & architecture knowledge. ( you can make some notes out of it )
- Be a part of the on- going current sprint : Always integrate yourself into the planning of on-going sprints – In the first sprint you can provide the test estimation for test related activities ( test case writing, knowing the baseline for acceptance testing, framework planning and acceptance testing environment setup)
- Be a part the next sprint – You may need to update the major changes and adoption of the test automation framework and address and issues before starting the new sprint etc.
- Keep writing acceptance criteria test cases for each item for the next sprint: A tester needs to write test cases using their own user stories. Here you also have the chance to make the other team members aware about QA test standards, user experience, performance issues and setting up the baseline for accepting testing. Ask for more help if needed to test some technical issues.
- Constantly upgrade acceptance criteria and maintain the old test cases: The product owner should provide feedback after each sprint to the tester in order to upgrade their test cases.
- Automate the API testing for current sprint: If your app is using API, it’ll reduce the UI test automation.
- Keep executing manual acceptance testing in the current sprint: When sprint is new, there is nothing much to automate so keep doing manual testing.
- Focus on the smoke test UI and Regression testing with previous sprints: Keep on tack of the automated scripts of old sprints to cover regression tests.
- Keep on exploratory testing – Automation won’t find all the bugs.
- Conduct retrospective meeting: Review what you did in testing, what you need to do more/less of to bring high quality software to the end customer.
Conclusion
In scrum, the tester becomes an integrated team member and contributes towards the development of high quality products for end customer.
