How to use your QA Skills in a Scrum-Based Project Part II

How to use QA skills in Scrum

The concept of multitasking and teamwork is very strong in Scrum, but there is not such a thing as ‘specialist in everything’ as people are always better in one area. Even if they know many other areas, they will never have time to do everything. Therefore, there are Developers and there are Testers.
In Scrum there is no separate phase of testing. Rather it is continuous development and testing. In Scrum, nobody is allowed to sit and wait for a delivery. Testers need to be an active member from the sprint’s start and everyone is expected to contribute.
The following are a few suggestions to a be good, proactive tester:

• Find what requirements mean and discuss the understanding with the development team
• Start to collect all information and learn. Capture the domain and analyze all the user stories
• Conduct sessions when you feel there isany confusion. You should have clarity of the business and all user stories
• Think like a QA, but behave and work like a Scrum Team member. Your  focus should always be on the quality of the product.
• You should have the skills to know how to build a release and how to deploy the release.
• Don’t consume much time on formal documentation like a Formal Test Plan or QA Plan.
• Just prepare a simple Test Plan if all activities are planned in your project.
• While developing test cases, always focus on business processes. Your test case must cover “Acceptance Criteria” of every user story.
• Write Test Cases as fast you can, do not waste time on long elaborations / clarifications.
• Reuse old Test Cases if possible, this can be part of a regression test
• If daily (or personal) build is possible, start testing and probe the developed functions. If Dev. resource is not available to provide you build/release, do not wait. Build the release and start testing.
• Make sure that for every task to be executed there is also Test Case to be written and executed.
• Test coverage is important, so create a model
• Remember that the sprint has an end time, so make all efforts to fulfill the time line.

Be sure to join next time when we discuss the testing approaches that can be used in Scrum!