Agile Should Not Marginalize Software Testers

By Author: Jan Stafford
Total Articles: 2
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As we know, many software development cultures put testing at the end of the development processes. However, according to Scott Barber, a software test consultant, some in Agile development want to push testing and testers even further out of the picture.

Not only do software testers often feel the pinch of Agile’s short iterations more than any group on development teams, they may also find their roles reduced, said Barber, Chief Technologist of PerfTestPlus, a software consultancy in Palm Bay, Fla., and co-author of Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications and Beautiful Testing. In this interview, he discusses Agile developers’ and managers’ perceptions of software testing and how the tester’s role can change in Agile organizations.

In Agile, the tester’s job to make sure that everything that gets checked in is shippable. Not that the complete product is shippable, but that what’s checked in is shippable. It’s somebody else’s job to say the collection of things we have checked in is product-able.

Well, the answer is that if you are really, really good at Agile and all your ...
... developers are really good and don’t put any bugs in the code, and your clients are right there on site and doing user acceptance testing pretty much in line, what’s the job of the tester? Yes, maybe you don’t need as many testers in that case; but that’s not often the case.

Apart from that, testers should have a certain mindset, a drive to help expose things that other people don’t find. That’s what they do. Developers are creators. Testers are explorers. Their job, their whole mindset, is to find the stuff that others don’t.

So there’s a value in having the tester’s perspective; that of a person who has dedicated an entire career to figuring out what is it that the user is going to do that no one expects them to do, and what’s it going to do to my system. There’s also value in that testing involves business risk mitigation. It shifts focus from minimum requirements to the QA-centric role into a risk exposure mode.

All that said, in Agile you might need fewer testers; maybe you’re replacing some of your testing with your real users, your acceptance test people. That’s not eliminating test. It is changing personnel.

Until testers are willing to accept that change in role, they’re going to resist the whole thing. The more resistant testers are, the less developers want them on the team. In Agile, successful testers are those who say, ‘It’s my job now to help the developers achieve their vision and keep that vision in sync with the end user’s vision.’

Agile testers must have a broad enough skill set that they can lend a hand in some other areas, without handholding, at the very early development level. Beyond that, the ones who have enough technical chops to be able to do a little simple unit testing, execute the unit test or read through some code fare well in Agile. But it’s the attitude more than the technical skills that really help.