What is Agile and Scrum, and what does a tester do during a sprint?
AgileJunior
In shortAgile is an approach of delivering software in small, frequent increments; Scrum organizes this into sprints. Testers are involved throughout the sprint, from refining stories to testing and regression.
Model answer
Agile is a way of building software in small increments, releasing often and adapting to feedback instead of planning everything up front.
Scrum is the most popular Agile framework. Work is done in sprints (usually two weeks), with:
- Roles: product owner (decides what to build), scrum master (helps the process), developers (everyone who builds, including testers).
- Events: sprint planning, daily scrum, sprint review, retrospective, plus backlog refinement.
- Artifacts: product backlog, sprint backlog, increment.
What a tester does in a sprint:
- Refinement and planning: asks questions about user stories, helps write clear acceptance criteria, points out risks and edge cases, helps estimate testing effort.
- Early in the sprint: prepares test scenarios and test data while developers code; tests stories as soon as they are ready, not all at the end.
- During the sprint: reports bugs quickly and talks directly with developers, retests fixes, does exploratory testing.
- Daily scrum: shares progress and blockers (“the filter story is blocked by a crash on Android”).
- End of the sprint: regression testing, helps demo the stories in the review, suggests improvements in the retrospective.
The key idea is that quality is the whole team’s responsibility, and the tester helps the team build it in from the beginning.
Learn more: SDLC and STLC
What they're looking for
A basic understanding of Agile values and Scrum events, and that testing happens continuously inside the sprint with the tester collaborating from the start.
Common mistakes
- Describing testing as a separate phase at the end of the sprint.
- Not knowing the main Scrum events or roles.