The Agile Manifesto for Testers Part 2

Contract negotiation in traditional projects is when the customer and the business decide the scope of the project and the costs for these features.  All of the project details are decided up front and the project plan is defined for the project.  As the project development proceeds, unforeseen circumstances and factors that were not previously foreseen could arise, making it necessary for the project to make changes. The detailed project scope and well defined timelines for the project make it difficult for all parties to accommodate these changes.

Being successful in developing the right solution for the customer means working closely with them and listening to what their needs are. Agile projects have ceremonies that facilitate customer collaboration. For Scrum projects, Sprint Review meetings are one of the best times to get the customers’ view on the product being developed. However, Agile teams should still be able to freely maintain a good relationship with the customers and communicate with them outside of these meetings. While everyone in the team is responsible for this, testers hold the special place of having the point of view from quality assurance, and can further enhance feedback gathering from the customers.

“Responding to change over following a plan”

Risks and changes can incur additional expenses for a project, and for traditional projects, they must be extensively planned for.  Testing a complex system completely can be costly and is often not feasible.  When unplanned changes are required, there will become extra costs for traditional projects.  For example, an unforeseen technical incompatibility discovered during development would have to bring the project back to the design phase, which could prolong the project timeline and waste the work already developed.

Agile, on the other hand, has more room for responding to risks and changes, due to its iterative nature. Agile teams know that experimentation is part of developing the product, so what was once an initial requirement could change later on in the project. Testers need to keep up to date with the product requirements to in quickly adapting to these changes. There will be situations where a plan might not be communicated thoroughly and the user stories not updated accordingly, so the testers will be challenged to collaborate more effectively with the team to still have the right coverage of testing. These changes also require the testers to implement regression testing to ensure that new feature development does not have a negative impact on the application. This is where test automation becomes all the more a necessity for Agile projects – the scripts can be run to check the existing features while the testers can focus on the new features.

What’s important here is that the team moves forward and does its best to communicate to one another on what needs to be done to ensure that they are developing the product right. In Agile, change is an opportunity to improve the product and the process, and is very much welcome.

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