One of the most important aspects of building good software is to encourage the concept of build, measure and learn. For companies to be able to innovate and be quick to market they must encourage a good engineering culture that sets up teams for success. In an ideal world, you should deliver to production daily. However, if you deliver software fast, but it is full of bugs, your product has a lower chance of succeeding. As an agile tester, one of your focus points has to be to speed up the feedback loop while maintaining good quality. Over the years I have laid across a few good practices that make teams build the product right and also build the right product. Engage Test Engineers as early as possible in the development cycle Test Engineers are often treated as the last stand against finding problems before release, yet like all software activity; their focus is affected by the information available to them. In order to better understand the risk associated with changes an
My last 2 gigs were a bit different to the usual ones from a team composition point of view. The bit that was different was that there weren't any Business Analysts on the team. My initial concerns were who would gather requirements? Who would analyse stories? Who would negotiate scope with the business? Who would be involved in Scope Management? Who would be our proxy customer? The above questions got me concerned, but it wasn't as bad as i thought it to be. The customer was co-located with the team and we had easy access to validate our understanding on business rules, scope, sign-offs etc. Our team composed of an IM, Devs and Testers. The IM was managing scope with the customer and getting the priorities. The team would then sit with the business to understand what the requirements were and we would create Epics and then further break them down into smaller chunks of workable stories. A thing to note here is that all roles would put their BA hat on and identify gaps if