A Tester's Role in Agile Projects

Some agile methodologists claim that testers are not needed in agile projects--all testing is done either by developers or users. Chris Hetzler has seen the effects of that approach, and they are not pretty. When customers find
bugs in large projects, the costs can be staggering. Chris believes that testers must be involved in agile projects at an even higher intensity since timelines are shorter and the risk of failure is higher. But Chris explains that testers' roles change and testers must be prepared for that change. In agile projects, the testers' role is one of quality engineer rather than the traditional product
validation and verification. This means the testers become the "go-to" people whenever a quality issue is raised. When Chris' development group adopted this strategy for involving their testers in their latest product release, the end result was a product with 95% code coverage, 98% regression run pass rate, and extremely high customer satisfaction.

• Learn how testers work within projects
• Create effective test strategies within projects
• Apply the lessons learned to your projects