TL;DR

This post gives a list of typical software tester tasks. This list is aligned with Black Box Software Testing Foundations course (BBST) created by Rebecca Fiedler, Cem Kaner and James Bach.

When you start as new fresh software tester in agile project, you can expect that you will be assigned following tasks:

• research how this product could fail (requirements analysis from testers point of view)
• hunt bugs (exploratory risk based testing)
• analyze the specification and create tests that trace to specification items of interest
• create set of test data with well understood attributes (to be used in several attributes and archived)
• create reusable tests (manual and automated)
• create checklists for manual testing or to guide automation
• research failures and write well researched, persuasive bug reports

Conclusion

Every of this basic test tasks requires separate skill set and  theory that will be covered in future posts.