Listen to “Know Your Value as a Tester with Dawn Haynes” on Spreaker.
The most common request I get as a consultant these days is to help testers and teams transition to an Agile development process or to help testers be more effective in “agile-ish” environments. Interestingly, the core answer to these questions starts with “forget the process for a moment and focus on yourself and what you’re trying to accomplish.” Being Agile starts with a mindset and an attitude which drive focus, approaches, and solutions. When you start there, the path to improvement can almost always be summarized as “being more agile” — which is surprisingly independent of whether or not your team follows an Agile Process.
Let’s explore what it means for a tester and a test team to be more agile (whether or not you do Agile) and what benefits you can expect to experience if you decide to increase your agility as a tester.
