TL;DR

As a fresh software tester in agile team, you must be aware that context is important input that will steer your software testing. This post will give examples of software testing context that is aligned with Black Box Software Testing Foundations course (BBST) created by Rebecca Fiedler, Cem Kaner and James Bach.

Definition

Imagine that you attending your first software testing conference. You are surrounded with experienced software testers. There is coffee break and you are ready for your first question:

When should I do full regression test?

The probable answer: Well, it depends.

Why are software testers so careful? They need your context. In software testing, context is the king. Same answer would be good for one context, terrible in another.

Example

Context 1: Project just started. Product requirements are in great flux. Every deploy is flaky and full of regression issues. New features break previous one. Developers are still trying different helper libraries and change them a lot. Each pull request changes almost all project files, with file deletion included.

Context 2: First release is deployed on production and  tagged in git. Developers are satisfied with most of their libraries, every pull request is focused and contains files related with deployed feature.

In which case you will do regression test that covers all available features?

Conclusion

Question without context 1 and 2 does not give the question receiver full picture. Remember, you should always ask question with question context, this is important in order to get answer that could help you.

Answer to my example question is: context 1.