Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams

Chapter 2 Ten Principles for Agile Testers

Everyone on an agile team is a tester. Anyone can pick up testing tasks. If that’s true, then what is special about an agile tester? If I define myself as a tester on an agile team, what does that really mean? Do agile testers need different skill sets than testers on traditional teams? What guides them in their daily activities?

In this chapter, we talk about the agile testing mind-set, show how agile values and principles guide testing, and give an overview of how testers add value on agile teams.

What’s an Agile Tester?

We define an agile tester this way: a professional tester who embraces change, collaborates well with both technical and business people, and understands the concept of using tests to document requirements and drive development. Agile testers tend to have good technical skills, know how to collaborate with others to automate tests, and are also experienced exploratory testers. They’re willing to learn what customers do so that they can better understand the customers’ software requirements.

Who’s an agile tester? She’s a team member who drives agile testing. We know many agile testers who started out in some other specialization. A developer becomes test-infected and branches out beyond unit testing. An exploratory tester, accustomed to working in an agile manner, is attracted to the idea of an agile team. Professionals in other roles, such as business or functional analysts, might share the same traits and do much of the same work.

Skills are important, but attitude counts more. Janet likes to say, “Without the attitude, the skill is nothing.” Having had to hire numerous testers for our agile teams, we’ve put a lot of thought into this and discussed it with others in the agile community. Testers tend to see the big picture. They look at the application more from a user or customer point of view, which means they’re generally customer-focused.

The Agile Testing Mind-Set

What makes a team “agile”? To us, an agile team is one that continually focuses on doing its best work and delivering the best possible product. In our experience, this involves a ton of discipline, learning, time, experimentation, and working together. It’s not for everyone, but it’s ideal for those of us who like the team dynamic and focus on continual improvement.

Successful projects are a result of good people allowed to do good work. The characteristics that make someone succeed as a tester on an agile team are probably the same characteristics that make a highly valued tester on any team.

An agile tester doesn’t see herself as a quality police officer, protecting her customers from inadequate code. She’s ready to gather and share information, to work with the customer or product owner in order to help them express their requirements adequately so that they can get the features they need, and to provide feedback on project progress to everyone.

Agile testers, and maybe any tester with the right skills and mind-set, are continually looking for ways the team can do a better job of producing high-quality software. On a personal level, that might mean attending local user group meetings or roundtables to find out what other teams are doing. It also means trying out new tools to help the team do a better job of specifying, executing, and automating customer requirements as tests.

The bottom line is that agile testers, like their agile teammates, enjoy learning new skills and taking on new challenges, and they don’t limit themselves to solving only testing issues. This isn’t just a trait of testers; we see it in all agile team members. Agile testers help the developer and customer teams address any kind of issue that might arise. Testers can provide information that helps the team look back and learn what’s working and what isn’t.

Creativity, openness to ideas, willingness to take on any task or role, focus on the customer, and a constant view of the big picture are just some components of the agile testing mind-set. Good testers have an instinct and understanding for where and how software might fail, and how to track down failures.

Testers might have special expertise and experience in testing, but a good agile tester isn’t afraid to jump into a design discussion with suggestions that will help testability or create a more elegant solution. An agile testing mind-set is one that is results-oriented, craftsman-like, collaborative, eager to learn, and passionate about delivering business value in a timely manner.

Applying Agile Principles and Values

Individuals can have a big impact on a project’s success. We’d expect a team with more experienced and higher-skilled members to outperform a less talented team. But a team is more than just its individual members. Agile values and principles promote a focus on the people involved in a project and how they interact and communicate. A team that guides itself with agile values and principles will have higher team morale and better velocity than a poorly functioning team of talented individuals.

The four value statements in the Agile Manifesto, which we presented at the start of the first chapter, show preferences, not ultimatums, and make no statements about what to do or not to do. The Agile Manifesto also includes a list of principles that define how we approach software development. Our list of agile “testing” principles is partially derived from those principles. Because we both come from the Extreme Programming culture, we’ve adopted many of its values and underlying principles. We’ve also incorporated guidelines and principles that have worked for our teams. Your team’s own values and principles will guide you as you choose practices and make decisions about how you want to work.

The principles we think are important for an agile tester are:

Provide Continuous Feedback.

Deliver Value to the Customer.

Enable Face-to-Face Communication.

Have Courage.

Keep It Simple.

Practice Continuous Improvement.

Respond to Change.

Self-Organize.

Focus on People.

Enjoy.

Provide Continuous Feedback

Given that tests drive agile projects, it’s no surprise that feedback plays a big part in any agile team. The tester’s traditional role of “information provider” makes her inherently valuable to an agile team. One of the agile tester’s most important contributions is helping the product owner or customer articulate requirements for each story in the form of examples and tests. The tester then works together with teammates to turn those requirements into executable tests. Testers, programmers, and other team members work to run these tests early and often so they’re continually guided by meaningful feedback. We’ll spend a lot of time in this book explaining ways to do this.

When the team encounters obstacles, feedback is one way to help remove them. Did we deliver a user interface that didn’t quite meet customer expectations? Let’s write a task card reminding us to collaborate with the customer on paper prototypes of the next UI story.

Is management worried about how work is progressing? Display a big visible chart of tests written, run, and passing every day. Display big-picture functionality coverage such as test matrices. Having trouble getting the build stable? Lisa’s team displayed the number of days remaining until time to tag the build for release in order to keep everyone focused on finishing stories in time. After that became a habit, they didn’t need the visual cue anymore.

Deliver Value to the Customer

Agile development is about delivering value in small releases that provide exactly the functionality that the customer has most recently prioritized. This usually means limiting scope. It’s easy to get caught up in the customer team’s desire for cool features. Anyone can question these additions, but a tester often recognizes the impact to the story, because they need to think about the testing repercussions.

Lisa’s Story

Our product owner participates in planning meetings before each iteration. Nevertheless, after the iteration has started and we discuss more details about the stories and how to test them, he often brings up an idea that didn’t come out during the planning, such as, “Well, it would really be nice if the selection on this report could include X, Y, and Z and be sorted on A as well.” An innocent request can add a lot of complexity to a story. I often bring in one of the programmers to talk about whether this addition can be handled within the scope of the story we had planned. If not, we ask the product owner to write a card for the next iteration.

—Lisa

Agile testers stay focused on the big picture. We can deliver the most critical functionality in this iteration and add to it later. If we let new features creep in, we risk delivering nothing on time. If we get too caught up with edge cases and miss core functionality on the happy path, we won’t provide the value the business needs.

Lisa’s Story

To ensure that we deliver some value in each iteration, our team looks at each story to identify the “critical path” or “thin slice” of necessary functionality. We complete those tasks first and then go back and flesh out the rest of the features. The worst-case scenario is that only the core functionality gets released. That’s better than delivering nothing or something that works only halfway.

—Lisa

Agile testers take the same approach as that identified in Lisa’s story. While one of our skills is to identify test cases beyond the “happy path,” we still need to start by making sure the happy path works. We can automate tests for the happy path, and add negative and boundary tests later. Always consider what adds the most value to the customer, and understand your context. If an application is safety-critical, adding negative tests is absolutely required. The testing time needs to be considered during the estimation process to make sure that enough time is allotted in the iteration to deliver a “safe” feature.

Enable Face-to-Face Communication

No team works well without good communication. Today, when so many teams are distributed in multiple geographical locations, communication is even more vital and more of a challenge. The agile tester should look for unique ways to facilitate communication. It is a critical aspect to doing her job well.

Janet’s Story

When I was working with one team, we had a real problem with programmers talking with the product owner and leaving the testers out of the discussion. They often found out about changes after the fact. Part of the problem was that the developers were not sitting with the testers due to logistical problems. Another problem was history. The test team was new, and the product owner was used to going straight to the programmers.

I took the problem to the team, and we created a rule. We found great success with the “Power of Three.” This meant that all discussions about a feature needed a programmer, a tester, and the product owner. It was each person’s responsibility to make sure there was always a representative from each group. If someone saw two people talking, they had the right to butt into the conversation. It didn’t take very long before it was just routine and no one would consider leaving the tester out of a discussion. This worked for us because the team bought into the solution.

—Janet

Any time there is a question about how a feature should work or what an interface should look like, the tester can pull in a programmer and a business expert to talk about it. Testers should never get in the way of any direct customer-developer communication, but they can often help to make sure that communication happens.

Agile testers see each story or theme from the customer’s point of view but also understand technical aspects and limitations related to implementing features. They can help customers and developers achieve a common language. Business people and software people often speak different languages. They have to find some common ground in order to work together successfully. Testers can help them develop a shared language, a project dialect, or team jargon.

Brian Marick (2004) recommends that we use examples to develop this language. When Lisa’s team digresses into a philosophical discussion during a sprint planning meeting, Lisa asks the product owner for an example or usage scenario. Testers can encourage whiteboard discussions to work through more examples. These help the customers envision their requirements more clearly. They also help the developers to produce well-designed code to meet those requirements.

Face-to-face communication has no substitute. Agile development depends on constant collaboration. Like other agile team members, the people doing testing tasks will continually seek out customer and technical team members to discuss and collaborate. When an agile tester suspects a hidden assumption or a misunderstood requirement, she’ll get a customer and a developer talking about it. If people in a different building or continent need to talk, they look for creative ways to replace face-to-face, real-time conversations.

Have Courage

Courage is a core value in XP, and practices such as test automation and continuous integration allow the team to practice this value. The developers have the courage to make changes and refactor the code because they have the safety net of an automated regression suite. In this section, we talk about the emotional courage that is needed when transitioning to an agile team.

Have you worked in an organization where testers were stuck in their own silo, unable to talk to either business stakeholders or other members of the technical team? While you might jump at the chance to join a collaborative agile environment, you might feel uncomfortable having to go ask the customer for examples, or ask a programmer to help automate a test or bring up a roadblock during the daily stand-up.

When you first join an agile team, or when your current team firsts transitions to agile development, it’s normal to experience fear and have a list of questions that need to be answered. How in the world are we going to be able to complete testing tasks for each story in such a short time? How will testing “keep up” with development? How do you know how much testing is enough? Or maybe you’re a functional testing manager or a quality process manager and it’s not clear to you where that role fits on an agile team, and nobody has the answers. Agile testers need courage to find the answers to those questions, but there are other reasons as well for having courage.

We need courage to let ourselves fail, knowing that at least we’ll fail fast and be able to learn from that failure. After we’ve blown an iteration because we didn’t get a stable build, we’ll start thinking of ways to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

We need courage to allow others to make mistakes, because that’s the only way to learn the lesson.

Lisa’s Story

I worked on a project where the agile coach insisted that I be on a separate testing team (often a team of one!) whose work wasn’t included in the programmers’ tracking and velocity. I had to just go along and try this. After the release ran into trouble because testing wasn’t finished, I asked the coach if we could try things my way for an iteration or two. The whole-team approach worked much better. Each story was tested and “done” by the end of the iteration, and the customers were much happier with the results.

—Lisa

We need courage to ask for help, especially when the person who could provide that help looks pretty busy and stressed-out himself. Climbing out of your old silo and joining in a team responsibility for success or failure takes courage. Asking a question or pointing out what you think is a flaw requires courage, even in a team supported by agile values and principles. Don’t be afraid! Agile teams are open and generally accepting of new ideas.

Keep It Simple

Kent Beck’s Extreme Programming Explained advised us to do the simplest thing that could possibly work. That doesn’t mean the first thing you try will actually work, but it ought to be simple.

Agile testers and their teams are challenged to not only produce the simplest possible software implementation but to take a simple approach to ensuring that software meets the customer requirements. This doesn’t mean that the team shouldn’t take some time to analyze themes and stories and think through the appropriate architecture and design. It does mean that the team might need to push back to the business side of the team when their requirements might be a bit elaborate and a simpler solution will deliver the same value.

Some of us worked in software organizations where we, as testers and quality assurance staff, were asked to set quality standards. We believe this is backwards, because it’s up to the customer team to decide what level of quality they want to pay for. Testers and other team members should provide information to customers and help them consider all aspects of quality, including nonfunctional requirements such as performance and security. The ultimate decisions are up to the customer. The team can help the customer make good decisions by its taking a simple, step-by-step approach to its work. Agile testing means doing the simplest tests possible to verify that a piece of functionality exists or that the customer’s quality standard (e.g., performance) has been met.

Chapter 9, “Toolkit for Business-Facing Tests that Support the Team,” and Chapter 11, “Critiquing the Product Using Technology-Facing Tests,” give examples of test tools.

Simple doesn’t mean easy. For testers, it means testing “just enough” with the lightest-weight tools and techniques we can find that will do the job. Tools can be as simple as a spreadsheet or a checklist. We need to automate regression tests, but we should push them down to the lowest level possible in order to encourage fast feedback. Even simple smoke tests might be enough for business-facing test automation.

Exploratory testing can be used to learn about your application and ferret out hard-to-find bugs, but start with the basics, time-boxing side trips and evaluating how far to go with edge cases. Simplicity helps us keep our focus on risk, return on investment, and improving in the areas of greatest pain.

Part IV, “Test Automation,” explains how to build a “doable” test automation strategy.

Practice Continuous Improvement

Looking for ways to do a better job is part of an agile tester’s mind-set. Of course, the whole team should be thinking this way, because the central core of agile is that the team always tries to do better work. Testers participate in team retrospectives, evaluating what’s working well and what needs to be added or tweaked. Testers bring testing issues up for the whole team to address. Teams have achieved their greatest improvements in testing and all other areas through the use of process improvement practices such as retrospectives and impediment backlogs. Some improvement ideas might become task cards. For larger problems, teams focus on one or two issues at a time to make sure they solve the real problem and not just the symptom.

Agile testers and their teams are always on the lookout for tools, skills, or practices that might help them add more value or get a better return on the customer’s investment. The short iterations of agile development make it easier to try something new for a few iterations and see whether it’s worth adopting for the long term.

Learning new skills and growing professionally are important to agile testers. They take advantage of the many available free resources to improve their specialized skills, such as exploratory testing. They go to meetings and conferences, join mailing lists, and read articles, blogs, and books to get new ideas. They look for ways to automate (or get help from their coworkers to automate) mundane or repetitive tasks so they have more time to contribute their valuable expertise.

Pierre Veragren, an SQA Lead at iLevel by Weyerhaeuser, identified a quality we often see in agile teams ourselves: “AADD,” Agile Attention Deficit Disorder. Anything not learned quickly might be deemed useless. Agile team members look for return on investment, and if they don’t see it quickly, they move on. This isn’t a negative characteristic when you’re delivering production-ready software every two weeks or even more often.

Retrospectives are a key agile practice that lets the team use yesterday’s experience to do a better job tomorrow. Agile testers use this opportunity to raise testing-related issues and ask the team to brainstorm ways to address them. This is a way for the team to provide feedback to itself for continual improvement.

Lisa’s Story

Our team had used retrospectives to great benefit, but we felt we needed something new to help us focus on doing a better job. I suggested keeping an “impediment backlog” of items that were keeping us from being as productive as we’d like to be. The first thing I wrote in the impediment backlog was our test environment’s slow response time. Our system administrator scrounged a couple of bargain machines and turned them into new, faster servers for our test environments. Our DBA analyzed the test database performance, found that the one-disk system was the impediment, and our manager gave the go-ahead to install a RAID for better disk access. Soon we were able to deploy builds and conduct our exploratory testing much faster.

—Lisa

We’ll talk more about retrospectives and how they can help your team practice continuous improvement in Chapter 19, “Wrap Up the Iteration.”

Respond to Change

When we worked in a waterfall environment, we got used to saying, “Sorry, we can’t make this change now; the requirements are frozen. We’ll have to put that in the first patch release.” It was frustrating for customers because they realized that they didn’t do a great job on defining all their requirements up front.

In a two-week agile iteration, we might have to say, “OK, write a card for that and we’ll do it in the next iteration or next release,” but customers know they can get their change when they want it because they control the priority.

Responding to change is a key value for agile practitioners, but we’ve found that it’s one of the most difficult concepts for testers. Stability is what testers crave so that they can say, “I’ve tested that; it’s done.” Continuously changing requirements are a tester’s nightmare. However, as agile testers, we have to welcome change. On Wednesday, we might expect to start stories A and B and then C the next Friday. By Friday, the customer could have re-prioritized and now wants stories A, X, and Y. As long as we keep talking to the customer, we can handle changes like that because we are working at the same pace with the rest of team.

Some agile teams try to prepare in advance of the next iteration, perhaps by writing high-level test cases, capturing business satisfaction conditions, or documenting examples. It’s a tricky business that might result in wasted time if stories are re-prioritized or greatly changed. However, distributed teams in particular need extra feedback cycles to get ready for the iteration.

Lisa’s Story

Our remote team member used to be our on-site manager. He’s a key player in helping the business write and prioritize stories. He has in-depth knowledge of both the code and the business, which helps him come up with creative solutions to business needs. When he moved to India, we looked for ways to retain the benefit of his expertise. Meetings are scheduled at times when he can participate, and he has regular conference calls with the product owner to talk about upcoming stories. We’ve had to switch from low-tech tools such as index cards to online tools that we can all use.

Because the team was willing to make changes in the way we worked, and looked for tools that helped keep him in the loop with ongoing changes, we were able to retain the benefit of his expertise.

—Lisa

Some teams have analysts who can spend more time with the business experts to do some advance planning. Each team has to strike a balance between brainstorming solutions ahead of time and starting from scratch on the first day of each iteration. Agile testers go with the flow and work with the team to accommodate changes.

Automated testing is one key to the solution. One thing we know for sure: No agile team will succeed doing only manual testing. We need robust automation in order to deliver business value in a time frame that makes it valuable.

Self-Organize

The agile tester is part of a self-organizing agile team. The team culture imbues the agile testing philosophy. When programmers, system administrators, analysts, database experts, and the customer team think continually about testing and test automation, testers enjoy a whole new perspective. Automating tests is hard, but it is much easier when you have the whole team working together. Any testing issue is easier to address when you have people with multiple skill sets and multiple perspectives attacking it.

Lisa’s Story

My team is a good example of a self-organizing team. When we implemented Scrum, we had a buggy legacy system and no automated tests. Making any changes to the code was risky at best. Our manager probably had some excellent solutions to the problem, but he didn’t suggest them. Instead, we explored the issues and came up with a plan.

The programmers would start implementing new stories in a new, testable architecture, using test-driven development. The testers would write manual regression test scripts, and the entire team—programmers, testers, the system administrator, and the DBA—would execute them on the last two days of every iteration. The testers (at the time, this meant me) would work on an automated regression smoke test suite through the user interface. Eventually, the architecture of the new code would let us automate functional tests with a tool such as FitNesse.

We implemented this plan in baby steps, refining our approach in each iteration. Using the skills of every member of the team was a much better approach than my going off and deciding the automation strategy on my own.

—Lisa

When an agile team faces a big problem, perhaps a production showstopper or a broken build, it’s everyone’s problem. The highest-priority issues are problems for the whole team to solve. Team members discuss the issue right away and decide how to and who will fix it.

There’s no doubt that Lisa’s manager could have mandated that the team take this approach to solving its automation problems, but the team itself can come up with the most workable plan. When the team creates its own approach and commits to it, its members adopt a new attitude toward testing.

Focus on People

Projects succeed when good people are allowed to do their best work. Agile values and principles were created with the aim of enabling individual and team success. Agile team members should feel safe and not have to worry about being blamed for mistakes or losing their jobs. Agile team members respect each other and recognize individual accomplishments. Everyone on an agile team should have opportunities to grow and develop their skills. Agile teams work at a sustainable pace that lets them follow disciplined practices and keep a fresh perspective. As the Agile Manifesto states, we value individuals and interactions over processes and tools.

In the history of software development, testers haven’t always enjoyed parity with other roles on the development team. Some people saw testers as failed programmers or second-class citizens in the world of software development. Testers who don’t bother to learn new skills and grow professionally contribute to the perception that testing is low-skilled work. Even the term “tester” has been avoided, with job titles such as “Quality Assurance Engineer” or “Quality Analyst” and team names such as “QA Department” given preference.

Agile teams that adhere to the true agile philosophy give all team members equal weight. Agile testers know they contribute unique value to their teams, and development teams have found they are more successful when their team includes people with specific testing skills and background. For example, a skilled exploratory tester may discover issues in the system that couldn’t be detected by automated functional tests. Someone with deep testing experience might ask important questions that didn’t occur to team members without testing experience. Testing knowledge is one component of any team’s ability to deliver value.

Enjoy

Working on a team where everyone collaborates, where you are engaged in the project from start to finish, where business stakeholders work together with the development team, where the whole team takes responsibility for quality and testing, in our opinion, is nothing short of a tester’s Utopia. We’re not alone in believing that everyone should find joy in their work. Agile development rewards the agile tester’s passion for her work.

Our jobs as agile testers are particularly satisfying because our viewpoint and skills let us add real value to our teams. In the next section, we’ll explore how.

Adding Value

What do these principles bring to the team? Together, they bring business value. In agile development, the whole team takes responsibility for delivering high-quality software that delights customers and makes the business more profitable. This, in turn, brings new advantages for the business.

Team members wear many hats, and agile development tends to avoid classifying people by specialty. Even with short iterations and frequent releases, it’s easy to develop a gap between what the customer team expects and what the team delivers. Using tests to drive development helps to prevent this, but you still need the right tests.

Agile testers not only think about the system from the viewpoint of stakeholders who will live with the solution but they also have a grasp of technical constraints and implementation details that face the development team. Programmers focus on making things work. If they’re coding to the right requirements, customers will be happy. Unfortunately, customers aren’t generally good at articulating their requirements. Driving development with the wrong tests won’t deliver the desired outcome. Agile testers ask questions of both customers and developers early and often, and help shape the answers into the right tests.

Agile testers take a much more integrated, team-oriented approach than testers on traditional waterfall projects. They adapt their skills and experience to the team and project. A tester who views programmers as adversaries, or sits and waits for work to come to her, or expects to spend more time planning than doing, is likely to cling to skills she learned on traditional projects and won’t last long on an agile team.

Peril: You’re Not “Really” Part of the Team

If you’re a tester, and you’re not invited to attend planning sessions, stand-ups, or design meetings, you might be in a situation where testers are viewed as somehow apart from the development team. If you are invited to these meetings but you’re not speaking up, then you’re probably creating a perception that you aren’t really part of the team. If business experts are writing stories and defining requirements all by themselves, you aren’t participating as a tester who’s a member of an agile team.

If this is your situation, your team is at risk. Hidden assumptions are likely to go undetected until late in the release cycle. Ripple effects of a story on other parts of the system aren’t identified until it’s too late. The team isn’t making the best use of every team member’s skills, so it’s not going to be able to produce the best possible software. Communication might break down, and it’ll be hard to keep up with what the programmers and customers are doing. The team risks being divided in an unhealthy way between developers and testers, and there’s more potential that the development team will become isolated from the customer team.

How can you avoid this peril? See if you can arrange to be located near the developers. If you can’t, at least come to their area to talk and pair test. Ask them to show you what they’re working on. Ask them to look at the test cases you’ve written. Invite yourself to meetings if nobody else has invited you. Make yourself useful by testing and providing feedback, and become a necessity to the team.

Help customers develop their stories and acceptance tests. Push the “whole team” attitude, and ask the team to work on testing problems. If your team is having trouble adapting to agile development, suggest experimenting with some new ideas for an iteration or two. Propose adopting the “Power of Three” rule to promote good communication. Use the information in this book to show that testers can help agile teams succeed beyond their wildest expectations.

During story estimating and planning sessions, agile testers look at each feature from multiple perspectives: business, end user, production support, and programmer. They consider the problems faced by the business and how the software might address them. They raise questions that flush out assumptions made by the customer and developer teams. At the start of each iteration, they help to make sure the customer provides clear requirements and examples, and they help the development team turn those into tests. The tests drive development, and test results provide feedback on the team’s progress. Testers help to raise issues so that no testing is overlooked; it’s more than functional testing. Customers don’t always know that they should mention their performance and reliability needs or security concerns, but testers think to ask about those. Testers also keep the testing approach and tools as simple and lightweight as possible. By the end of the iteration, testers verify that the minimum testing was completed.

Lines between roles on an agile team are blurred. Other team members might be skilled at the same activities that testers perform. For example, analysts and programmers also write business-facing tests. As long as all testing activities are performed, an agile team doesn’t necessarily require members who identify themselves primarily as testers. However, we have found that teams benefit from the skills that professional testers have developed. The agile principles and values we’ve discussed will help any team do a good job of testing and delivering value.

Summary

In this chapter, we covered principles for agile testers and the values we think an agile tester needs to possess in order to contribute effectively to an agile team.

An “agile testing mind-set” is customer-focused, results-oriented, craftsman-like, collaborative, creative, eager to learn, and passionate about delivering business value in a timely manner.

Attitude is important, and it blurs the lines between testers, programmers, and other roles on an agile team.

Agile testers apply agile values and principles such as feedback, communication, courage, simplicity, enjoyment, and delivering value in order to help the team identify and deliver the customer requirements for each story.

Agile testers add value to their teams and their organizations with their unique viewpoint and team-oriented approach.