The Agile Tester’s Mindset

On traditional projects, testers usually join the project after coding has started—or even later when coding is almost finished. Testers have no role in advising the project team early regarding quality issues but focus only on finding defects. They become accustomed to this style of working and adjust their mental processes accordingly. On agile projects, where testers must collaborate closely with customers and programmers throughout the development lifecycle, their focus changes from finding defects to preventing them. Janet Gregory shares ways to change the tester’s mindset from How can I break the software? to How can I help deliver excellent software?—a critical mental shift on agile projects. Another aspect of the mindset change is learning how to test early and incrementally. Janet uses examples to help you understand how effective this mindset change is—and how you can apply it on your agile projects.