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I have been assigned a task to create a Testing process in the company. Our company uses Agile methodology. The task is to create a generic plan which determines the role of a QA/Tester in the complete agile STLC. Scrum is what we are trying to implement.

We can assume the team of 4 developers and 1 QA. Also please suggest if a separate developer for QA-Automation is required or the same QA with limited knowledge should be hired. Currently we don't have any automation framework. Everything is being done from scratch.

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Coming to your 2nd question-

I think your company should have one separate automation QA & it should have sufficient knowledge about automation Tool (Selenium, QTP…etc.). Coming to Automation framework: First check your project domain, analyses it & choose any automation tool Like Selenium, QTP etc.

As per my exp. Selenium is the best tool to perform automation testing. You can use any framework in automation but if you want to select easy & reusable code then you must select – Page Object Model framework in selenium, otherwise you may select –Data Driven framework.

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QA’s role in the 4 Agile meetings:

  • First, QA teams need to be focused on lean, flexible process, tools, and documentation which comes in stark contrast to traditional QA methodologies.

  • Secondly, QA teams need to be focused on a collaboratively working environment, one focused on trust and doing things for the betterment of the team.

  • Finally, QA teams need to embrace the idea that getting tasks completed as quickly as possible dictates that they ask themselves what value each work task provides. If a task holds little value or does not move the team forward, work with the Scrum Master and the team to decide whether or not the task can be eliminated.

Ultimately, being a productive Agile QA team member requires a little retraining on what is most important to the project: quickly having a quality releasable product.

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  • Is this your website? swatsolutions.com/agile-now-role-qa-agile Or did you just copy and paste from there?
    – Joe Strazzere
    Commented Mar 31, 2016 at 18:00
  • So, why are you not answering this question? You could post your views, so that we 'll get exact idea about complete agile process.
    – Bharat Mane ♦
    Commented Apr 1, 2016 at 5:43
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    @BharatMane - if you copy-pasted answer from another website, good manners are to provide link to original, and instead of copy-pasting, provide a summary/digest. Don't pretend to be expert providing original insight if all you know is just following few good blogs. Sin is not following blogs but pretending.
    – Peter M. - stands for Monica
    Commented Apr 11, 2016 at 15:06
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I've been the guy that you're looking to hire a few times and I've looked at any number of job specs from various companies. There are plenty of examples out there, if you pretend to be looking for a testing role which will provide you with a basic template.

I think it's acceptable for a tester to set up a test framework. I'd certainly not recommend paying the salary of a whole other employee just to set one up. At the very worst, I'd look for a tester with automation experience and then perhaps dedicate 0.5 of an existing developer resource to fill in any gaps.

As someone who's hired and been hired a number of times, I'd definitely recommend that you include in your job spec the skills that your company actually need. I've seen so many cookie-cutter job specs that don't -really- tell you what they're looking for, or just list the most vanilla testing skills as requirements. Be as specific as you can.

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Hi its better to hire a Senior Manual QA with some automation experience and also this person to want to develop his/her automation skills. Most commonly Seniors manual QA's have an automation experience.

For a company which is planning to growing its QA team it is an important thing its first engineers in the company to have a strong technical and soft skills.

According to Agile the whole team is responsible for quality of the project including developers.

My suggestion about Agile processes to set up a serious tool like Jira and Confluence. It costs $20 monthly up to 10 users. This will help you to track stories, performance of the team and to lead a documentation accessible to everyone.

@Stanislav about

Quality Assistance instead of QA engineers

in Atlasssian I would like to mention that they implemented a really serious development process. I had a chance to met an Atlasssian developer and to discuss this with him. Yes developers writes their test but first of all they create a functionality or testable increment after that they have a code review, then they create tests which has a code review as well. So for such a structure they will need from some people in the beginning with really ninjas skills to implement it and to be responsible for quality.

In my view and experience a Senior QA and clear agile process would be a reasonable and effective solution.

Good luck!

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Do not hire Automation QA

  • They are usually much less qualified than developers, but the salaries are comparable. A lot of technical challenges in testing require many years of hands-on dev experience which most of AQA lack.
  • AQAs do not usually touch Dev's code (at least because they're not the authors of it). Therefore if the code is not very testable, QA often implements nasty hacks in the tests. But a developer can change the code to be more testable and spend much smaller amount of time on that.
  • AQAs mostly write System tests instead of following the Test Pyramid that's actually useful. Many System tests slow down the whole team and increase the project spendings.
  • With separate AQA person the stories are getting finished later (often in the next sprint) while if developer writes the tests he would have to finish with them before moving the task to Done. This activity is much more likely to be included into sprint planning than AQA activity.

Hire a developer who's good at testing and processes

There are almost none of them on the market, but at least he won't be useless.

  • He can both implement an optimized automated testing and share his experience with other developers. If he codes, he won't be treated as someone external to the team and therefore will be allowed to change the production code to facilitate testing.
  • Try to find a person who's interested in CI/CD since testing is a very important part of these practices. Automated testing doesn't bring a lot of benefits if it's outside of CI/CD.
  • Try to implement Quality Assistance instead of Quality Assurance like Atlassian did for one of their projects.

Make developers responsible for quality

Often developers neglect the quality and are very bad at testing. Help them to work in this direction:

  • Hire a manual test engineer with good test theory background. Ask that person to teach developers and to review their tests (I have a positive experience introducing such a person into the team). It's not always easy as Devs may be irritated by that. This all would depend on managers and leads and how they treat this endeavour.
  • If devs are responsible for the quality there won't be as much of bugs in general and the project will have a very good boost in performance.
  • Only if developers are responsible for the quality it's possible to implement Continuous Delivery.
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  • Agree with many of the points here. wonder why people down voted it
    – Deepika Fernando
    Commented Dec 12, 2016 at 13:39
  • Hurts their feelings :)
    – Stanislav Bashkyrtsev
    Commented Dec 12, 2016 at 16:33

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