The Scrum Team Size for Testers Part 2

In Agile, it’s part of testers’ tasks to work closely with the other Development Team members, but they are already in a vulnerable position. After all, creators generally find it hard when someone points out everything wrong with their own outputs – and testers do just that. Aside from reporting test statuses and bugs, testers also need to do bug prevention work, such as design reviews and requirements clarification. And for the bugs that do surface, testers need to collaborate with the developers closely to ensure that the bugs are reproducible and fixed the right way.

All this talk on team size and complexity of relationships brings us to this question: How many testers to how many developers should there be in a Scrum team?

Tester – Developer Ratio/s

Aside from determining team size, tester – developer ratios are also one of the burning topics in software development, and coming up with a consistent, final answer is not as easy as it sounds. This is because there are a lot of things to look at when deciding on this ratio, including:

• Type of application to test
• Number of different configurations to test
• Test-ability of the application
• Skill level and experience of the developers and testers
• Quality standards to meet and maintain
• Tools that are readily available

Some organisations employ a 1:1 tester-developer ratio, while some organisations have it at 1:3. Because there are varying tester-developer ratios, it is very risky for an organisation taking another organisation’s ratio and applying them to their projects – without the assessment of the factors listed above. Furthermore, Agile testing practices should not change with the team size or ratio. This may mean that everyone will need to expand their skills and be able to collaborate with one another to the best of their abilities. Having a lower tester-developer ratio doesn’t mean that there was less testing work done – it simply meant that everyone shares ownership for the product quality and followed testing practices.

Team size and ratios matter in a way that they should be good enough for teams to build software efficiently and effectively. But no matter what the team size or ratio is, testers have the responsibility to have everyone on the Scrum team have sound Agile testing practices to build software with quality.

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Our Book Recommendations

We found these books great for finding out more information on Agile Scrum: