Roles and responsibilities of a tester in Agile methodology

As you know, in agile methodology, Developers, Testers and Business work closely. So before going to the topic "Roles and responsibilities of a tester", here I give a brief description about Agile method. In this method the entire application development activity will be divided into regular time frames called sprints. The sprint period may be one or two weeks, one month or 2 months based on the nature of the project. So the first phase is sprint planning.

1. Sprint Planning

The first day of a sprint will be taken for sprint planning. This is the time when task will be allocated to all the team members in the team. User stories which can be taken for this particular sprint will be analyzed and scope is set. (User stories are basically the business requirements).

2. Track level activities

Once the user stories for the sprint are finalized, track level activities will be started. For developers, this is the implementation phase where they start coding for the functionalities. For a tester, this is the time for writing test cases for that particular user story.

Application will be available for testing in the test environment when one particular functionality or a group of functionalities are implemented. (This will not be the final build for testing). Tester starts testing at this time and bugs will be logged to the tracking tool as soon as they are detected. The test cases will be marked as pass/ fail based on the result.

Developer makes fixes for the defects and marks the status as fixed whichever is applicable. Testers retest the defects and closes/Reopens. This process will be repeated till all the bugs are closed.

So in generally the roles and responsibilities of a tester in this phase are,

1. Analyzing the Requirements from user stories.
2. Understanding functionality of feature.
3. work closely with the development staff in all phases of development.
4. Communicate more with developers and end-users
5. Participating in preparing Test Plans.
6. Preparing Test Scenarios.
7. Preparing Test Cases for the product.
8. Preparing Test Data?s for the test cases.
9. Preparing Test Environment to execute the test cases.
10. Analyzing the Test Cases prepared by other team members.
11. Executing the Test Cases.
12. Defect Tracking.
13. Giving mandatory information of a defect to developers in order to fix it.
14. Retesting the fixed bugs to check for existence and to check for its effect.
15. Preparing Suggestion Documents to improve the quality of the application.

3. Regression testing

This is the final phase of a sprint after all the major bugs are closed and all the functionalities are implemented. This is conducted so as to make sure that none of the functionalities are broken due to the intermediate fixes. It is the tester?s duty to make the set of regression test cases.Bugs found during this phase also will be logged into the tracking tool. It is the business who decides whether to continue with the release if bugs are still open.

So in generally the roles and responsibilities of a tester in this phase are,

1. Preparing Regression Test Cases
2. Executing the Test Case
3. Defect Tracking.
4. Understanding the severity of the bug and give information to developers in order to fix it.
5. Retesting the fixed bugs to check for existence and to check for its effect.
6. Update the Status of Bug in Bug tracking tool.

Tester should ensured that the developing program and final product satisfies their customer's needs and they do this in every phase of the software development life cycle.