The Agile Principles for Testers

1. Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

Customer satisfaction is one of the main goals of Agile. As this principle stated, Agile teams need to be able to make a product that satisfies their customers and their needs. That means the product has to meet expectations. While a product will never be 100% bug-free, it would be a nightmare when a customer would lose thousands in a bank transaction due to an overlooked bug. One of the goals of testing is to make sure that product risks are mitigated and that the customers won’t encounter problems that will impede their tasks. By keeping the customer in mind, teams will aim to plan and strategise the coverage of their testing better to prioritise and ensure customer satisfaction.

2. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.

Agile teams should understand that businesses strive to stay competitive in the market, and they do that by adapting and evolving their products to current and upcoming trends. Because testers design their tests around customer requirements, they’ll need to be able keep up with the fast pace of Agile and embrace change. They need to be more flexible in order to hit their targets.

3. Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.

Traditional software development frameworks used to put system integration tests, user acceptance tests, and regression tests at the end of the project timeline. The earlier stages of the project would then be for analysing all the requirements in order to come up with test plans, test scenarios, and test cases. This is no longer the case with Agile, where features are divided into backlog items, which are further distributed into various iterations. For testers, this means that although there are less items in an iteration as compared to an entire project timeline, they are also challenged to manage their test activities effectively. They need to strategise how they can have solid testing coverage, given the shorter amount of time for testing.

4. Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.

Because the Agile team is making a product targeted at their users, their best method of getting what they want is to collaborate with the customers. Testers can help the development team by clarifying requirements with their customers as well as the Product Owner. By being able to do this daily, feedback loops are shorter, and can help refine product increments faster.

5. Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.

Individuals who are motivated make great products, and part of motivating individuals is being in a good relationship with them. Testers must do their best to be able to work well with everyone on the team. They are in a tough position to call out what could be improved in the product, and so it is beneficial for testers to be able to communicate these effectively while maintaining a good working relationship with the team.

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Our Book Recommendations

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