Thursday, July 3, 2008

What an Agile Tester Does

This has been kind of a crazy week. I've had to multitask a lot, which I know is bad and inefficient. Here's a sample of the types of tasks I've done this week:
- Write high level test cases
- Automate tests in FitNesse
- Debug problems with Canoo WebTest GUI tool and tests
- Look into three different production issues
- Manual exploratory tests of various stories
- Participate in estimation meeting
- Spend a lot of time getting requirements and clarifications from various customers
- Help team strategize best way to make sure we get everything completed this sprint

If you're an tester on an agile team, are those in line with the things you do? Are you surprised by any of them?

I think some people might not expect a tester to work on production issues, but as testers, we tend to learn a lot about the business domain. It's natural for business people to come ask me where something is documented on our wiki, or how a piece of functionality is supposed to work (at least, how we delivered it, maybe we were wrong on how it should work!) I get interested in production problems because I want to know how we didn't run across a particular issue in testing. Working on production issues isn't in my job description, I suppose, but it helps me learn a lot about the app and what we can do to improve it.

I know a lot of agile testers who do similar tasks. I'm interested in what other things agile testers do.

No comments: