The end of the ‘Internet’ testers

In the days of waterfall project the testers did not have anything to do during the first half of a project. During this period they would spent most of their time surfing the net and rewriting their test plans. Nowadays with cross functional teams the testers play a significant role right from the beginning of the project.

The role of a tester is not just testing anymore. An agile tester helps the team figure out what needs to be delivered at the end of a sprint. He plays an important role in clarifying the user stories and establishing a common understanding on the requirements within the team. During sprint planning the tester helps to clarify the user stories by also paying attention to things that could go wrong (Developers often have the tendency to see only the happy flow). Next to that testers lead the work on requirement examples prior to sprint planning to start the feedback early on. During the sprint the testers continuously provide feedback to the rest of the team to ensure the right thing is build correctly the first time.

In a agile team everybody does testing. In order to achieve this you need to enable the whole team to perform testing and still be independent. That’s the whole point why traditional methods identify a separate testing role and/or department. Testing does not need to be separate for it to be independent or objective! You can reach objectiveness by writing objective acceptance test examples for each story before you actually develop them. Once you have those any person of a team can do the objective testing and therefore teams are encouraged to test as a team.

When the team finishes a story during the sprint, a tester can have a feedback session with the product owner by demonstrating the user story and showing that the acceptance criteria are met. This is specially valuable in case the product owner is discovering what it really needs! In that case the acceptance criteria or the accompanying specifications are vague and the team helps the product owner figure out what he wants. Based on what he sees he gets a better understanding on what he really needs. It’s like when you want to buy a table. You know what a table looks like, but you can’t exactly specify the table you want. That’s why you go visit stores to see various tables. One table you see helps you to decide on the table size, while another helps you decide on the color and yet another helps you see the style and material you like. By having seen these examples you steadily get a clearer and more accurate picture of what it is you really want.

So for the testers there is no more laying back during the early stages of the project, but instead being part of the team right away and working hard to help the team achieve its sprint goal.