The Tester's Role in Agile Planning

If testers sit passively through agile planning, important testing activities will be glossed over or missed altogether. Testing late in the sprint becomes a bottleneck, quickly diminishing the advantages of agile development. However, testers can actively advocate for customers’ concerns while helping the team implement robust solutions. Rob Sabourin shows how testers can—and should—contribute to the estimation, task definition, clarification, and scoping work required to implement user stories. Testers apply their elicitation skills to understand what users need, collecting great examples that explore typical, alternate, and error scenarios. Rob shares many examples of how to break agile stories into a variety of test-related tasks for implementing infrastructure, data, non-functional attributes, privacy, security, robustness, exploration, regression, and business rules. Rob discusses his experiences helping transform agile testers from passive planning participants into dynamic advocates who address the product owner’s critical business concerns, the team’s limited resources, and the project’s technical risks.