Agile Testers Roles and Responsibilities

Quality Assurance (QA) Team’s job in Agile Software Development environment is more challenging because there is no software requirement specifications (SRS) for testing team to verify development release and the team often has a user story and some acceptance criteria in which any good tester can quickly poke holes.

Development team always says that they will fix these minor issues in next iteration or the fact is that build can be changed after showing it to customer. Then Testing Team or Testers usually say “Well, then there's no point in testing now if the code changes, I'll just need to re-test all this stuff anyway. Call me when things stop changing.” But it doesn’t solve the problem.

So what are the roles and responsibilities of a tester / QA Team in Agile software development environment?

Deliver Quality Product: Being a tester in an agile development environment is about improving the quality of the product before it's complete. It also means becoming an integrated and important part of the development team. They help ensure the software-each little bit that's complete-is verified before its users validate it. Testers are involved early to help describe acceptance criteria before the product is written. Their experience is valuable to finding issues that likely will cause issues with customers.

Provide Early Feedback: Provide feedback early, often, and on anything. It will save the cost of changing major things at the end of the project.

Add Value to the Business: Add value throughout the whole life-cycle, by starting early and testing the design until the code is implemented. Assist Design in identifying alternate scenarios and business rules and assist in refining requirements. Contribute in helping to solve the business problem.


I think tester role is all about providing feedback on analysis, requirements, design and implementation as early as possible. What do you think? please tell me in comments.

Scrum methodology of Agile

Can we afford not to use Agile software methodology? I think no. Water fall model may complete your project on the time according to specification but may not deliver value to the end user. That’s why continues feedback is important though the whole software life cycle.

Agile software development aims to develop and implement software quickly in close cooperation with the customer in an adaptive way, so that it is possible to react to changes set by the changing business environment and at the same time maintain effectiveness and efficiency.

To accomplish this you should emphasis on tacit knowledge and sharing it via frequent face-to-face communication and by concentrating on producing working software instead of documentation.

SCRUM is an agile, lightweight process for managing and controlling software and product development in rapidly changing environments. Iterative, incremental process Team-based approach developing systems/ products with rapidly changing requirements Controls the chaos of conflicting interest and needs Improve communication and maximize cooperation Protecting the team form disruptions and impediments A way to maximize productivity

See What this Presentation explains about Scrum methodology of Agile.