7 Tips to be More Innovative in the Age of Agile Testing to Survive an Economic Crisis

What is Agile Testing?

“Agile testing involves testing from the customer perspective as early as possible, testing early and often as the code becomes available and stable enough from module/unit level testing.” – A Wikipedia definition.

This tutorial will give you simple and easy tips on how to be more innovative in the age of agile testing to survive an economic crisis.

Let’s explore!!

Need for Innovations in the Age of Agile Testing

Global Recession/Economic Downtime Effect

Current Events are not Current Trends

When global downturns hit, there is a certain inevitability to their impact on the information technology and finance sectors. Customers become more reluctant in giving software business. Some customers are withdrawing from their long-term projects and some customers are using the opportunity in quoting low prices.

Many projects that dragged on for much longer than expected and cost more than planned. So, companies have started to explore how “Agile with different flavors” can help their enterprises to more reliably deliver software quickly and iteratively.

The roles and responsibilities of Test Managers/Test Architects become more important in implementing Agile Projects. Innovations are increasingly being fueled by the needs of the testing society at large.

Challenges in Agile Testing

Agile Testers face a lot of challenges when they are working with an Agile development team. Testers should be able to apply Root-Cause Analysis while finding severe bugs so that they are unlikely to reoccur. While Agile has different flavors, Scrum is one process for implementing Agile.

Some of the challenging scrum rules to be followed by every individual are:

•  Obtain Number of Hours Commitment Up Front
•  Gather Requirements / Estimates Up Front
•  Enter your actual hours and estimated hours daily.
•  Daily Builds
•  Keep the Daily Scrum meetings short
•  Code Inspections are Paramount

So, in order to meet the above challenges, an agile tester needs to be innovative with the tools that they have. A great idea happens when what you have (tangible and intangible) meets the world’s deepest hunger.

How Can Testers be More Innovative in the Age of Agile Testing?

Here are the Important Keys to Innovation:

#1) Creative: A good Agile Tester needs to be extremely creative when trying to cope up with the speed of development/release.  For a tester, being creative is more important than being critical.

#2) Talented: He must be highly talented and strive for more learning and innovating new ideas. Talented Testers are never satisfied with what they have achieved and always strive to find unimaginable bugs of high value and priority.

#3) Fearless: An Agile Tester should not be afraid to look at a developer’s code and if need arises, hopefully in extreme cases, go in and correct it.

#4) Visionary: He must have a comprehensive vision, which includes the client’s expectations and delivery of a good product.

#5) Empowered: He must be empowered to work in Pairs.  He will be involved in Pair Programming to bring shorter scripts, better designs and find more bugs.

#6) Passionate: Passionate Testers always have something unique to contribute – that may be in terms of their innovative ideas, the way they carry day-to-day work, their outputs and improve things around them tirelessly.

#7) Multiple Disciplines: Agile Tester must have multiple skills like Manual, Functional, Performance testing skills and soft skills like Leadership skills, Communication skills, EI, etc. so that agile testing will become a cakewalk.

“Innovation is the process of turning ideas into manufacturable and marketable form”–  Watts Humpry

About Author: This is a guest post from J.B.Rajkumar. He has extensive experience in both Academics as well as Software Testing.  He was a Trainer, QA Manager,  frequent Speaker for Colleges, Universities and International Conferences and currently  working with a top MNC

Note: If you have ANY queries on “Agile Testing and its Methods”, please do comment below. We will address each and every comment as a separate post.