"Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory point out the hidden asset on many development teams: the testers. By learning from agile teams, software teams using any type of development methodology can improve their use of testers and testing.
What do the words tester or QA engineer bring to mind? They're those people who think of ways to break the software, right? Isn't QA the team that comes in after the coding is done, to tell the programmers what they did wrong? It doesn't take all that much skill to be a tester; anyone could pound on a keyboard and check whether the software works, right?
Wrong. Think again.
In traditional projects, requirements are defined up front, usually by business analysts or product managers. Testers have learned to analyze each requirement—looking for completeness, ambiguity, correctness, and much more—so that they can write detailed test cases. However, development teams using this type of phased and gated methodology often tie the testers' hands, giving them no way to get requirements changed if they find contradictions or unclear specifications. By contrast, testers on agile teams get the opportunity to accommodate and embrace change. By observing how testers contribute value on agile projects, we can see how agile testing principles and practices may be applied, regardless of the development methodology being used. The key is making testers full partners with developers, giving them access to business experts, and involving them from the very beginning of each project.
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