What do you mean "Agile Tester"?

I don’t make a distinction between Agile Tester and Context Driven Tester. I’m a tester. I just happen to work with a team running a Scrum-ish flavour of Agile. We have our various rituals that are observed, standup, demos, sprints, retrospectives.

‘Where does testing fit into Agile’ seems to be an oft heard query.

A short and flippant answer might be – everywhere and it happens naturally. If you’re being snarky, you might add ‘unless you’re a tester who is locked into an incompatible set of testing rituals’.

The truth is that there are as many variables in team dynamics as there are in the projects they work on. Where you fit might differ based on things like the skills the group already has, how long the group has existed before you arrived, their openness to having a new team member and your skill set relative to theirs (to name a few).

I’d like to spend some time talking about my experiences with the group I work with at eBay, the challenges we face, what works and what we’re working to improve.

I like to think it will be illustrative for those who have never worked in an Agile context before and possible enlightening for other testers who do work in an Agile context, but who differ in their approach.