How a Quality Engineer can contribute in a Sprint
I have talked about the SDET effort in an Agile Team in my last posts. Now, let me go deep and provide some suggestion tasks in an Agile Sprint. As you know, an Agile Sprint is a short, time-boxed period when a scrum team works to complete a set amount of work [1]. In my scenario, my sprint is two weeks.
Let me start, with my own opinion. In my opinion, Sprint is time to execute. All testing planning should be complete previous, as example Grooming Session and Sprint Planning. I strongly follow this idea, because in a Sprint we have Stories and tasks already sized. So, there is no time for mistakes, doubts or rework. Sprint is the time to delivery Stories from the board.
So, follow my suggestions:
Who: Quality Engineer/SDET/Tester.
When: Sprint
What: In my opinion the greatest efforts from a SDET in a Sprint are:
· Automate Functional Tests. You and your team already created or think on Test Scenarios, so just automate them. Tests should be simple, fast and independent
· Run New Functional Scripts
· Run Smoke Testing
· Run Exploratory Testing
· Run Regression testing after Daily or Weekly
· Review Pipeline Results
· Open defects. If you find some issue/bug/Defect and your developer can’t work on It, open the defect as faster you can. You won’t open the defect to generate numbers, metrics or other blushed. You ‘ll open the defect to track the bad behavior and for documentation
· Track existent defects
· Work on Pair Sessions with your developers. You can provide inputs for your Developers, about Unit Tests and how to develop features. You can get suggestions from your developers too. This is the time to code, code and code
· Help your E2E Test and Performance Team
· Join Daily meeting, check the team delivery progress and provide your inputs
· Raise risks
· Enjoy the Sprint. The jobs should be funny
As you can see, there are many efforts to do. These are my suggestions based on my experience and my Sprint tasks. Besides that, sometime Sprints have problems, fails and It isn’t so funny. But, you as a team member should take notes from good and bad things from the Sprint and report on Sprint Retrospective. Work with your team for the next Sprint is better than current always.
1 — https://www.scrum.org/resources/what-is-a-sprint-in-scrum
