The role of testers in agile teams

Regarding the development model, most Internet companies have now completed the transformation from the traditional waterfall development model to the agile development model. Compared with the traditional testers, this transformation proposes a greater level of role positioning and skill stack. Challenge, so how should testers deal with it? Based on some summary experience of my usual work, let's talk about the direction that testers should work hard for, for your reference:

Role 1: Trainer

In the initial stage of transformation, testers should provide training and guidance for the weak links of developers (ie, business skills). Due to the difference in work tasks, developers have a good understanding of the module business and specific implementation details that they are responsible for, but they are not very clear about the peripheral modules or businesses, which are mainly reflected in the configuration and use. And this part is precisely where the testers have experience. At this time, testers need to carry out as much training and sharing work as possible, so that the team can make up for the shortcomings as quickly as possible, and have a better business experience in the subsequent development of user stories. Good control. The steps of training are as follows:

Collect team feedback, identify business weaknesses, and list

Conduct training and sharing for different topics in stages (sprint)

Keep training materials for future reference (documents, videos, etc.)

Role 2: Test Planner

For the test planner, I think the main function is to plan how to efficiently (time, resources, quality) to promote the development of user story testing. To do this is really not easy, we need to consider from two aspects:

Balance test and development workload

In an agile team at the ratio of testers and developers disparity in the case (mostly developers and more, at least now I have not seen more than the test development team ^_ ), for work, the testers can not match development At this time, you need some help from the developer. Several steps to carry out:

Testers create test strategies for user stories (test cases, environment configuration, etc.)

Relevant personnel review (including testing, PO, the developer responsible for user stories and another developer who will be responsible for testing)

Reviewers agree on test strategy

User story developers write code, and perform integration testing according to the test strategy after completion

After the code CheckIn, the developer responsible for testing executes the final test according to the test strategy

If necessary, testers are performing simple functional verification (exploratory testing)

The steps are relatively simple, but the operation is not easy. First, the testers need to be given a simple test theory training, including some test methods, test ideas, etc. (It is impossible to rely on training alone to make a big improvement, and it needs to be accumulated in the test. ), and then whether the developers are willing to do testing work, I think this is also a big problem encountered in the transformation, but fortunately, the development of our team is very nice, and some students will take the initiative to do some testing work , This is beyond my expectation. Here I still want to say that there are actually many benefits for developers to do some tests, which are mainly reflected in the improvement of code quality awareness, business understanding ability and personal skill stack. Of course, there are still some friends who are unwilling to do the task of testing, then there is no way, anyway, the development of testing is generally more beautiful and handsome

So the question is, are testers always responsible for creating test strategies for user stories? Of course not. After the developers have a better understanding of testing, they can try to let the developers create test strategies, and the testers are responsible for review. When the testers can't make too many changes, the testers can lose their jobs.

Do as many pair tests as possible

Pair testing means that two team members test the same function together. The purpose of this is twofold:

Test features from as many perspectives as possible

Training guidance (mainly for some testing theories and skills of developers)

Exploratory testing at the right time

This stage is a relatively advanced testing method, which is mainly carried out after the developers have certain testing methods and ideas. The time to perform exploratory testing is to organize multiple developers and testers to explore a functional main line after completing an important function, seeking to find as many potential problems as possible.

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