Responsibilities of QA Team in Agile Software Development

10-Sep-2018

Responsibilities of QA Team in Agile Software Development

We are hired in a company means, we have certain responsibilities towards our role and job and hence the responsibilities of a QA in an Agile environment.

Old is not always gold!!

Thinking of the QA team we get reminded of the traditional ways where developers would first build a specific feature completely and only then pass it on to QA to make it “Tested OK“.

But old is not always gold and hence the traditional methods changed for good. The agile methodology introduced QA with a versatile and dynamic role in the software development process to ensure that top-notch quality is achieved along with meeting the client’s acceptance criteria. In this approach, QA works collaboratively with the respective development team to assure that the product will not require any alterations for any further improvements, once completed.

What are the Major Responsibilities of QA?

There are responsibilities to be fulfilled by a tester in order to provide the clients/end users with a quality product whilst staying in an agile environment, some of which are:

1. Find and clear out differences in requirement & its documentation:

Agile processes started up with QA when people realized that testers can play an active role in analyzing the first requirements document that comes to them other than simply testing. They are expected to:

Meet the stakeholders to analyze and gather the ‘actual’ requirements before the development or even the designing phase, if needed.
At times, they can be assumed and must act as a stand-in product owner in user stories creation.

2. Be an aqueduct between developers and end-users:

You can’t just simply sit and wait for some product to come to you correctly if you are a QA in an Agile environment.

QA should take responsibility to bring out the most transparency between the end-users and developers in case of requirements, perspectives of respective stakeholders and end user’s feedback for builds.

3. Stay alert in planning sessions:

QA needs to actively participate in planning sessions bright from the point of outset to bring and maintain sync between developers and end-users.

They should provide their testing efforts and identify problematic issues at an early stage.

4. Continuous/Parallel testing to be performed:

The market may create a mess since it follows the rule of ‘Change is nature’ so the term QA was introduced at all stages of the development process. With the concept of Sprints, agile helps all teams to identify and resolve product-related issues on time, resulting in a better quality product to market.

Along with continuous testing, QA’s vigilance is equally important in these demos:

The In-House Demos: Here the developers demonstrate the final product to the QA team for their better understanding of the new feature and answer QA queries. Developers are also benefited as they learn some new scenarios that might get missed otherwise.
Demos to Stakeholders: Development and QA team demonstrate a newly developed feature to stakeholders collaboratively, for their better understanding of its proper working and answer their technical, commercial or general queries.

5. Automate and speed up testing:

Do you have automation testers with you? Well!! Utilize them. They can easily create automated test scripts out of user stories and can utilize the development phase to reduce testing time and time to market.

Conclusion:

It’s clear that QA has come a long way through agile practices. In BugRaptors, QA roles have outshined beliefs of the traditional boundaries, by following agile practices. BugRaptors’ QA team takes all responsibilities, of following the agile methodology benefit the company.

Also Read: Case Study on Agile Testing for Social Media Application

Achal Sharma

Achal works as QA engineer in BugRaptors. He is well versed with manual testing, mobile application testing, game testing, compatibility testing , Regression testing and sanity testing and able to create effective documentation related to testing like test case, test report etc.