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11/15/2011

Experiences working with an agile team as a tester

I had an opportunity of working in an agile software team as a software tester for last two and half month. Even though the time I spent there was small, I believe I could learn a lot for that time period. 

It was September 1st, 2011 that I was first introduced to the team. I used to work in traditional software projects and this was a new experience for me. I was quite new to the team, quite new to the product domain, quite new to the agile methodology. So I had to face those three challenges in order to fulfill the expectations of the team.

The project team comprised of 4 developers, BA and a tester. BA is also the project manager and the scrum master since we used SCRUM as the development methodology. The customer also played a significant role in the project. The customer comprised of company's CTO, Product owner,Project Manager cum QA manager, an Architect and 2 more developers. All work as a single team during the project. The teams were geographically dispersed.

Even though the team is diversified in terms of culture and geography, I found one common attribute that the entire team posses, that is the easy going and flexibility to the change. Specially the customer had a good understanding as to how a new project would evolve and he was expecting both best and worst case scenarios. We, as a team had ups and downs during first few weeks with regard to sprint/task estimations, communications, technical issues, team velocity issues, lack of domain knowledge issues and many more. And I was quite surprised to see that the customer was in better understanding and actually he was foreseeing them before us. 

The first task that I had to do as the QA person is to come up with a testing strategy for the project. The team had no prior knowledge of proper testing before and no process was followed before. I used to refer the following text book "Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams"  and found very useful and I recommend that every tester in agile teams should read this book.


to be continued...




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