TL;DR

This post gives examples of software tester responsibilities in Agile Project. Examples are from Black Box Software Testing.

It is important to understand that every software tester in Agile team has different objectives. Let’s recap the meaning of word objective (noun):

a thing aimed at or sought a goal.

So if you have a friend who is software tester in different company, or even in same company but on different project, your software testing goals will differ. That means that you will have different:

• test strategy
• testing tools
• tests
• test results
• test documents.

As a tester, you always search for information. Product information are not ONLY bugs. You will find a lot of known things, but also UNKNOWN things.

In February 2002, Donald Rumsfeld, the then US Secretary of State for Defence, stated at a Defence Department briefing: ‘There are known knowns. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don’t know.’

Here are examples of software tester tasks:

• find important bugs, for that you need to know product risks

• assets the quality of product, for that you need to know what is quality.

• help project manager to asses the progress of project, make release decision and stop premature releases, for that you need to know when you are done with testing.

• help project manager to predict and control product support costs, for that you need to know what you tested, what you did not tested, opened issues, issue workarounds

• check INTEROPERABILITY with other products, for that you need to know interfaces of those external products

• what are safe scenarios for use of product, you need to know that scenario is combination of several features

• assets conformance to specification, if you are lucky one and have a specification

• certify the product meets a particular standard, for example, your product is iOS mobile application that will be distributed using Apple Store.

• ensure the testing process meets accountability standard, for that you need to know that accountability is: responsibility, liability, answerability

• minimize the risks of safety-related lawsuits, for that you need to know product risks

• help client to improve product quality, testability and processes

• evaluate third party product.

Conclusion

This post will help you to identify true list of software tester responsibilities and to help you give better estimation when software testing will be done. This is your tool to identify project team members that would try to delegate on you their responsibilities.