In my last stint as a tester from October 2012 to Jan 2014, I helped my organisation at that time moving from delivering once every month, to delivering multiple times a day.

Let me first clarify that we didn’t move to multiple deliveries per day just for the fun of it, but because we needed it.

Your organisation might not yet know it needs this level of agility but more than likely it will at some stage in the future.

How did this transform the role of the testers within the organisation?

Massively

The start

When I joined I found scrum teams that delivered either once a month or once every 2 months. The teams had 3 different defects management databases full with old and new defects. Testers were doing the following activities:

automation (~30-50%) exploratory testing (~50-70&)

The batches were big, the exploratory sessions were long and found a lot of defects. The automation was not effective, as it was slow and unpredictable, its value was negative.

When I left

When I left, we were using kanban, delivering multiple times a day, defects were more or less a myth of the past, no defect management tool existed. Testers were doing the following activities:

Three amigos BDD sessions with customers and developers Exploratory testing (1~5%) – never longer than 10 minutes per card, more often than not reporting no defects Pairing with developers Coaching developers on testing Writing automation (0%) Talking to the customer and the team Improving the system Designing the product with the team and the customer Helping define what to monitor in production Any other valuable activity the team needed them to do

As you can see the activities that before occupied 100% of testers time, now occupy from 1 to 5% of testers time.

Were testers busy before? Yes, absolutely

Were testers busy after? Yes, absolutely

Were testers complaining because they weren’t doing automation or enough exploratory testing? No, believe me. Most testers I worked with saw the new activities in the role as a learning activity and an opportunity to broaden their skills and become more valuable to any company.

If a tester didn’t want to adapt to the new reality and embrace the change and new ways of doing things, he would have been busy for 10 minutes a day (~2%) and he would have not been useful to the team.

Did we get there with the touch of a magic wand? No, the end stage was the result of many experiments. It was, back then, a good recipe for that context at that time (it is continuously changing)

So, tester, what’s your strategy for working in a company that releases multiple times a day?