The Test Developer - An Easy Punchline?
I’ve been reading about and getting involved in conversations on the difference between a traditional lifecycle tester and an agile one. As the way projects with these type of people differ quite drastically in places, there are plenty of ways to describe what an agile tester is - I’m going to stick my neck out and mention one, a developer of tests rather than production code.
It’s a sweeping generalisation because there are a lot of software quality assurance tasks that an agile tester does before they touch an automation tool - they have to work with the team to define the acceptance criteria of the user stories, define and document the test environment to be used, perform exploratory testing on whatever code is available, review developed functionality etc.
However once they’re ’settled into’ the sprint there are developers performing TDD and producing code in a Continuously Integrated Environment and testers producing test code to ensure business-level descriptions/requirements are met.
Read More about: What is Software Testing?
Of course there are all the defects to be tracked and retested, and associated documentation to be produced but I’ve found that when I provide this eight-word description to people new to agile/agile QA/basically non-traditional ideologies in general, a glimmer of comprehension and (almost :-)) acceptance appears.
So, has anyone else found a quick way to describe to someone what an agile tester does? It may sound like a trivial thing to discuss but having been first QA person into several companies now, it’s very good to have ‘buzz-phrases’ to hand that provide quick descriptions to people who still have the mental block.
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