WHOLE TEAM APPROACH IN AGILE TESTING
In agile testing, quality is everyone’s responsibility. Testing in agile is not only about tester and is not only the tester role! This is also one of the biggest difference in Agile Testing and it is called as “Whole Team Approach”. This approach involves constant and high collaboration. Testers should have perfect communication with developers, customer teams, and all the parties. Teams shouldn’t have silos or walls. This is a fantastic thing for the test team that we should embrace.
In Agile, testers are not Quality Police or Gate Keepers. The whole team focus to maximize business value altogether. The team has to work together to fulfill all kinds of testing needs. This is not only testers responsibility. Developers should learn how to test better, also testers should learn some technical things such as system architecture, API testing, communication protocols, automation, performance, vulnerability checks, etc. Testers shouldn’t do testing only on the GUI Level. We have to check the APIs, DBs, protocols. Each team member can do testing in different ways and in different levels. Testers obviously can test better and deeper than the other team members. Thus, the team has to use the skill-sets in a right way to do testing more effectively.
Testers do not only test the acceptance criteria because everyone can do this in the team. We have to use our testing skills, techniques, tactics, brains, intuition, customer-focused insight to add business value, mitigate risks, prevent bugs before the development. And after development phase, we should test acceptance criteria and then try to break the system, go to limits of the product, explore alternative scenarios to find defects before production.
We should also evaluate the usability of the product. We can assess the performance, vulnerability, stability, installability, compatibility, accessibility, desirability, and several aspects. These are required more testing focused skills. When testers stuck or need help, all team has to help them and test the system together. In this way, the whole team tests the system and product more effectively.
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