What is Agile Testing?
"Agile testing involves testing from the customer perspective as early as possible, testing early and often as code becomes available and stable enough from module/unit level testing." - A wikipedia definition.
Why Need of Innovations in the Age of Agile Testing?
Global Recession/Economic downtime effect
Current Events are not Current Trends –
When global downturns hit, there is certain inevitability to their impact on information technology and Finance Sectors. Customers become more reluctant in giving software business. Some customers are withdrawing their long term projects and some customers using the opportunities in quoting low price. Many projects that dragged much longer than expected and cost more than planned. So, Companies started to explore how "Agile with different flavors" can help their Enterprises more reliably deliver software quickly and iteratively. The roles and responsibilities of Test Managers/Test Architects become more important in implementing Agile Projects. Innovations are increasingly being fueled by the needs of the testing society at large.
The Challenges in Agile Testing
Agile Testers face lot of challenges when they are working with Agile development team. A tester should be able to apply Root-Cause Analysis when finding severe bugs so that they unlikely to reoccur. While Agile has different flavors, Scrum is one process for implementing Agile. Some of the challenging scrum rules to be followed by every individual are
- Obtain Number of Hours Commitment Up Front
- Gather Requirements / Estimates Up Front
- Entering the actual hours and estimated hours daily.
- Daily Builds
- Keep the Daily Scrum meetings short
- Code Inspections are Paramount
So, in order to meet the above challenges, an agile tester needs to be innovative with the tools that they have. A great idea happens when what you have (tangible and intangible) meets the world's deepest hunger
How Testers Can be More Innovative in the Age of Agile Testing?
Here are Important Keys to Innovation:
1. Creative
A good Agile Tester needs to be extremely creative when trying to cope up with speed of development/release. For a tester, being creative is more important than being critical.
2. Talented
He must be highly talented and strives for more learning and innovating new ideas. Talented Testers are never satisfied with what they have achieved and always strives to find unimaginable bugs of high value and priority.
3. Fearless
An Agile Tester should not be afraid to look at a developer's code and if need be, hopefully in extreme cases, go in and correct it.
4. Visionary
He must have a comprehensive vision, which includes client's expectations and delivery of the good product.
5. Empowered
He must be empowered to work in Pairs. He will be involving in Pair Programming to bring shorter scripts, better designs and finding more bugs.
6. Passionate
Passionate Testers always have something unique to contribute that may be in terms of their innovative ideas, the way they carry day-to-day work, their outputs and improve things around them tirelessly.
7. Multiple Disciplines
Agile Tester must have multiple skills like, Manual, Functional, Performance testing skills and soft skills like Leadership skills, Communication skills, EI, etc. so that agile testing will become a cake walk.
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