What are the different testing activities in a Scrum Process?

• Sprint meeting - Deciding on which item should be picked from backlogs and estimated time for developing the component. It should also focus on the prioritizing the work.
• Daily scrum - In daily scrum meeting tester would collect the information about previously done tasks and also do plan for next task that has to be delivered to the developer.
• Daily work - Tester should perform acceptance test, system test and on the unit test and integration test tester should perform Automation test as part of the Daily work of the current sprint.

What is the role of QA in a Scrum?

Face–to-face communication

A face to face discussion with the team members is an efficient way of communicating ideas to the team. A tester would involve in planning/Sprint Release. Design meetings would be conducted every time before the sprint planning is done. Testers participate in this meeting and they would raise their questions on the stories that were discussed. Tester should have to imagine a model about how the system would look and work depending on the discussions.

Capability to find ambiguity

The tester would collaboratively work with the product owner and the customer to form acceptance criteria. An Agile tester would be able to describe the feature well. Before a user's story is sent for development team, the tester and other team members would discuss about the complete user story with the team members to find out what the customer actually wants.

Absolute Role

The tester should have good interpersonal skills .Tester should have Technical skills apart from that he should have good communication skills to deliver the project to the client . This shows that the tester should have a broader range of functionality.

Technical Skills

An Agile tester would understand how appropriate the technical skills are. He/she would always be ready to participate in the technical discussions of the team. His participation may extend up to code reviews, user stories grooming, requirements understanding. The Agile Software tester would work with the developers while they are performing unit testing and share the perspective of testing from a tester point of view instead of developer's point.

Automation

Agile would require Automation testing as well at the time of Unit and Integration Testing. For Automation there are many tools available which do not need any prior training.

Exploratory Testing

Exploratory testing is an extremely useful and powerful method sometimes in the agile process. An exploratory tester can use the tester's skills to perform testing in order to avoid risks and uncertainty in the product. The tester would get new ideas from the initial design discussions and the meetings with the team to uncover the system and explore more in the system. Once the tester can find out the areas of ambiguity, he could start working more systematically and efficiently on the product. An agile tester should share the knowledge and information with the rest of the scrum team.

Role of the Tester in Review and Retrospective meetings

• The tester must identify what went wrong and what went right in the current sprint.
• He needs to learn new lessons and best practices from the current sprint.
• The tester would be encouraged to write new user stories that would help in testing and also user stories that would help the customer.
• The tester would also discuss if any user story has not been covered in the current sprint.
• Any obstacles in the project would be put under consideration of Scrum Master.

What is the tester's skill in an Agile Methodology?

The agile tester should have good communication with team members and ready to give feedback. Automation testing knowledge is must for Agile tester.