This post was most recently updated on June 17th, 2019
What is testing in an agile process?
A software testing process that takes place in the agile software life cycle is known as Agile testing.The testing process in agile methodology is a continuous testing process. The development and Testing goes hand in hand in Agile methodology.The Testing start as soon as the project starts in agile with requirement analysis. The objective of the agile testing is to achieve the quality of software as early as possible.
Role of QA in agile-
1. Participate in the meetings – A QA takes part in the meetings right from the Sprint Planning, requirement analysis, design discussions. Analyze the and create a blueprint of the feature or the module to be developed. Raise the relevant questions to the developers or to the client at the very initial stage of the sprint. Part of daily standup meetings.
2. Define the acceptance criteria – After discussion with Scrum master, product owner and the respective developer on the requirements of a story; the tester’s understanding of the feature/ story will develops such a way that he/she can explain the same to the entire team. And finalize what exactly client expected from the feature which leads to be an entire team on the same page.
3. Co-ordination between the team and the client – The tester raised the queries related to the story and they get the answer from the product owner or from the client. This will avoid the un-necessary pauses in the continuous development process.
4. Testing process along with documentation – A tester gets involved in requirement analysis, writing high level scenarios, test cases as well as document it. Conduct the testing of the application as per story requirement, Log the bugs in bug tracking tool and track them till the closure. Prepare analysis report for the raised bugs to understand what kind of bugs are raised like the functional/Non-Functional, its severity, etc.. An agile tester can take part in the Unit testing as well. At a time the tester will be part of automation testing as and when required. He/she writes automation scripts to conduct integration or regression testing.
5. Internal and External Demos – Due to better understanding of the features and thorough testing of the feature a tester can have hands on the functionality developed. Hence a tester can present and explain the details to the internal team as well as to the client
6. Closure of the sprint – After a sprint completed the tester will get involved in the retrospective discussions with the team to understand what went well, What went wrong, which concerns can be avoidable and addressed on immediate basis etc.
Advantage of agile testing
1. Testing process starts at the very beginning of the project which helps to save time and the money.
2. The loopholes in the requirement and understanding can be found at a very initial stages of the project
3. The Quality of the delivered feature will be very high
4. The process is very flexible due to which new changes can be adapted very easily
5. Intermediate demos and discussion helps to get the feedback on the developed feature early
