ESTIMATING TASKS FOR TESTERS
It can be common for testers to find themselves rushing their testing work, especially when the developers only get to deploy user stories at the end of the Sprint. One way to mitigate this problem is estimating tasks. This is an exercise done by the development team during Sprint Planning. Task estimation is where they approximate how long it would take to finish tasks so that the development team can act accordingly throughout the Sprint. Because testing is a crucial activity in quality assurance, the testers must let everyone understand the effort needed to carry out their work.
How detailed should tasks be?
Before estimating tasks, it is important for the development team to agree on how granular their tasks should be for the user stories in the Sprint. They could be high-level tasks, such as “Develop a login page”, “Test login page”, and “Fix login page bugs”, or low-level tasks, such as “Collate SVG icons and images”, “Implement HTML/CSS/JS”, and “Create web services.”
Testers have a myriad of tasks themselves, including:
- Writing test plans
- Creating test cases
- Executing test cases
- Verifying fixes
Test deliverables can be big, and if the development team standard for task sizing calls for smaller tasks, they can divide these deliverables by creating a task for each section or test case. Some samples of low-level testing tasks include:
- List test approaches and test levels in the test plan
- Define test approaches and test levels
- Create test cases for User Story 001
- Prepare test cases and test scripts for regression testing
- Set up test data for testing
A good practice for making tasks more manageable is to write each task to take up a day or less for the task owner to finish. This allows each team member to match their tasks to the cadence of the Daily Scrum
Recommended Further Reading
The following materials may assist you in order to get the most out of this course: