Test Specialist on Agile Teams: A New Paradigm for Testers

As a tester on an agile team, are you still creating lots of scripted test cases the old way? Are you still caught in the classic waterfall-always behind-while the rest of the team is doing Scrum and looking forward? Then, change course and work with your team to become a test specialist, coordinating testing rather than only doing testing. Henrik Andersson describes his experiences on a Scrum team and their transition to his test specialist role. To orchestrate such a change, they needed new tools and approaches. So, Henrik gives a short introduction to behavior-driven development. For developing automated unit tests, he describes how their team learned to write tests in English-like Gherkin notation. Then, he demonstrates Developers’ Exploratory Testing, in which the entire team tests together and shares joint responsibility for the quality of the software. Take back a fresh perspective on the skills and tools testers need to become test specialists.