4 Tips To Become the Agile Tester of Your (Customer’s) Dreams!

Being agile is today’s way for businesses to deliver the intended value their customers expect from their services. Agile software development practices are being hailed globally as the new benchmark in technology product/project delivery. In this context, agile testing finds an irreplaceable seat in the agile bandwagon.

What is agile testing? Agile testing is nothing but testing software products in tune with agile development principles of collaboration, simplicity, transparency and response to feedbacks.

If you are a software tester, then this is where you need to be. So what does it take to be an agile tester? We draw up the important bits for you from the book “Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams” by L. Crispin and J. Gregory:

Deliver value to your customers

Agile testers should focus on the end-users who would be impacted by the product or software that is made. When faced with incomplete or inadequate requirements, agile testers may need to interact with either the client team or the developers to get more information. By doing so, they can help drive development by forming the right test cases. They also need to form a healthy collaboration with the technical and business teams to come out with test automation plans and ensure that customers are delighted with the end product – be it on performance or robustness.

Rapid response to change

An agile tester should be prepared to tackle changes as and when they occur. While older methodologies meant that you needed to prepare test cases in advance, scheduling your test activities months in advance is not really the norm for agile testing. When the project experiences rapid changes, you should have the flexibility to accommodate and handle changes.

Learn from feedback

As an agile tester, it is more important to focus on a continuous improvement strategy for testing your products or projects. Constant communication with stakeholders and developers is required to be able to incorporate timely changes in test automation, test cases, etc. so that the end product you deliver after each cycle or delivery period matches, and exceeds customer expectations, rather than just meeting their requirement.

Keep things simple

You may think that adopting an agile methodology is similar to a brain surgery, but in reality agile software development, and in this context agile testing, is all about keeping things simple. As agile testers, your role is to effectively drive development from the side of your engineering team towards the goals and expectations of the end user. Creativity, openness to exploratory testing, teamwork and a powerful mix of collaborative tools is all that is needed to get your agile methodology to reap benefits. Ensure that there is total transparency in the entire customer communication channel and that all requirements are correctly communicated to the concerned team or individual.

Today software testing is perhaps a component that demands as much level of attention as the development process. Choosing the right partner for your software testing needs is the perfect way to ensure robustness in your software product. Partner today with Cigniti, the world’s 3^rd largest independent software testing organization and ensure that your IT products exceeds your customer expectations.

And don’t take our word for it. Frost & Sullivan recognized Cigniti with the 2014 Global Frost & Sullivan Award for Customer Value Leadership. With a strong software testing resource pool and world-class infrastructural facilities, Cigniti has exhibited outstanding software testing service delivery. Know more.