Are you an agile tester? If not, maybe it’s time to add some agile experience in your tester role.
Times are changing. With business partners that are demanding fast results, the role of a software tester in an agile environment goes beyond reporting bugs.
There is an evolution going on in QA and testing. New requirements, techniques evolved from focusing on “what” needs to be tested, to “how” to test it.
Testing is no longer a separate task
If until now testers were uninvolved and the only rewarding thing was to break the system to find as many bugs as possible, nowadays they can support business analysts, architects and programmers by bringing in the testing perspective.
Develop agile skills to test better
In order to become a good agile tester you have to grow and extend your skills. This job is no longer limited to only executing test scripts, reporting bugs, errors, defects and signing off on releases.
Testers in an agile team can provide a lot of value and help the team deliver good quality software on a continuous basis. In order to improve and build quality into the product as early as possible, testers should be involved right from the start.
They are capable of identifying risks and prioritizing all tasks that could help deliver a functional product at the end of every sprint. Also they can help with suggestions and give input on automating nightly builds, integration, and regression.
Here are some skills that an agile tester with technical knowledge is able to bring in for the team:
- Know how to organize and prioritize work
- Use test automation to reduce execution time
- Help the developers in writing automated tests and analyze the results of the automated tests
- Create an automated test to run regression tests
- Learn how to become a test designer. Some programming skills will help
Your career is right in your hands. If you want to become a valuable agile tester there are plenty of opportunities out there, so go get them!