Agile Tester: A Day in the Life

Dawn Cannan, Novice track, 60 minutes

When organizations first adopt Agile software development, they often have difficulty understanding where testers fit into agile practices. Similarly, when testers join an ongoing agile group, they sometimes have a difficult time knowing how they can add the most value to the team. Common resources in the Agile world describe how team members can add value - user stories, TDD, pair programming, continuous integration - but few of these target the people whose role is "tester". Dawn Cannan starts with describing a "day in the life" of a tester on an agile project. She describes the aspects of testing that remain the same for testers, as well as some new goals, values, and techniques that testers can bring to the table. Exploring the relationship between testing practices and the practices of other team members, she describes the role that testers play in the shift from the goal of defect detection to the goal of defect prevention.

About the presenter

Dawn Cannan is a software test evangelist who has been working to integrate testers as members of software development teams and improving the working relationships between testers, developers, and everyone else for the past ten years. She has experience at both small and large companies, both co-located and distributed, spearheading test teams and improving their test infrastructure and strategy. When not speaking at testing and agile conferences and user group meetings, she spends her time working in the open source community on the .NET version of Selenesse, a plug-in making it possible to create Selenium tests in FitNesse. She also writes actively, publishing articles and posting to her blog at passionatetester.com.