ESTIMATING AGILE USER STORIES FOR TESTERS
In Scrum, testers are not a separate team who just test the application being built. Scrum teams are cross-functional, and developers, analysts, and testers contribute their time and skills to work together on completing user stories and the product.
What Testers Need to Consider When Estimating
The following factors need to be considered when testers estimate user stories with the rest of the Scrum Team:
1. Amount of work
Like other team members, testers have a variety of tasks in a Sprint, including test setup, test execution, and defect reporting. But the amount of effort needed for one user story will differ from another. For example, testing a user story about a login page will differ from testing a user story about a sign-up page. Both pages have different fields, the latter having more fields to fill out. Aside from understanding what needs to be developed, the work that goes into developing the user story must also be understood.
2. Complexity of work
User stories will also vary in the complexity of implementation. There will be varying scopes of testing work needed for each user story. Testers need to be able to plan the different ways to test each user story, as well as the scope of each user story. An SSO login page could be more complex than a regular login page, even if they share similar purposes of logging a user into the website. They could differ in implementation and technology layers, so the test scenarios and approaches could also differ. The acceptance criteria of a user story will also give insight to complexity, so testers must also consider them in their estimation.
Recommended Further Reading
The following materials may assist you in order to get the most out of this course: