7 Tips to be More Innovative in the Age of Agile Testing to Survive an Economic Crisis

“Agile testing involves testing from the customer perspective as early
as possible, testing early and often as code becomes available and
stable enough from module/unit level testing.” - A wikipedia definition.

Why Need of Innovations in the Age of Agile Testing?

Global Recession/Economic downtime effect
Current Events are not Current Trends –

When global downturns hit, there is certain inevitability to their
impact on information technology and Finance Sectors. Customers become
more reluctant in giving software business. Some customers are
withdrawing their long term projects and some customers using the
opportunities in quoting low price. Many projects that dragged much
longer than expected and cost more than
planned. So, Companies started to explore how “Agile with different
flavors” can help their Enterprises more reliably deliver software
quickly and iteratively. The roles and responsibilities of Test
Managers/Test Architects become more important in implementing Agile
Projects. Innovations are increasingly being fueled by the needs of the
testing society at large.

The Challenges in Agile Testing

Agile Testers face lot of challenges when they are working with
Agile development team. A tester should be able to apply Root-Cause
Analysis when finding severe bugs so that they unlikely to reoccur.
While Agile has different flavors, Scrum is one process for
implementing Agile. Some of the challenging scrum rules to be followed
by every individual are

•  Obtain Number of Hours Commitment Up Front
•  Gather Requirements / Estimates Up Front
•  Entering the actual hours and estimated hours daily.
•  Daily Builds
•  Keep the Daily Scrum meetings short
•  Code Inspections are Paramount

So, in order to meet the above challenges, an agile tester needs to
be innovative with the tools that they have. A great idea happens when
what you have (tangible and intangible) meets the world’s deepest hunger

How Testers Can be More Innovative in the Age of Agile Testing?

Here are Important Keys to Innovation:

1. Creative

A good Agile Tester needs to be extremely creative when trying to
cope up with speed of development/release.  For a tester, being
creative is more important than being critical.

2. Talented

He must be highly talented and strives for more learning and
innovating new ideas. Talented Testers are never satisfied with what
they have achieved and always strives to find unimaginable bugs of high
value and priority.

3. Fearless

An Agile Tester should not be afraid to look at a developer’s code
and if need be, hopefully in extreme cases, go in and correct it.

4. Visionary

He must have a comprehensive vision, which includes client’s expectations and delivery of the good product.

5. Empowered

He must be empowered to work in Pairs.  He will be involving in Pair
Programming to bring shorter scripts, better designs and finding more
bugs.

6. Passionate

Passionate Testers always have something unique to contribute that
may be in terms of their innovative ideas, the way they carry
day-to-day work, their outputs and improve things around them
tirelessly.

7. Multiple Disciplines

Agile Tester must have multiple skills like, Manual, Functional,
Performance testing skills and soft skills like Leadership skills,
Communication skills, EI, etc. so that agile testing will become a cake
walk.