A QA-guy blog

With "Agile methodologies" currently gaining more and more ground, there's a little bit of anxiety, especially among Software Testers, about "Roles merge" idea. Let me comfort you - roles do merge, but they do not disappear. Let's have a look at this in a little bit more details - first, let's discuss why roles do and should merge in Agile projects, then why they will never disappear. Why roles merge An agile team is typically is a cross-functional team having a shared goal (well, at least in theory). For instance, this goal may be to paint a room, prepare a party, write the best ever software or anything else. This means that there will be a situation where one needs to step in and help others do their job.

So, you decide that your project needs test automation because manual testing is too long or too costly to address your needs. How would you approach that? In essence, there’re two opposite approaches to test automation. Let’s call them “test-first” and “automate first” Test-first approach  In this realm, you have the luxury of having somebody actually designing a test case for you so you can automate it. Quite often, this is a place where many “test automation” engineers would like to be. These means they are actually being developers because they have requirements (which is a test case) and a product (which is an automated test case). They also have a clear goal (automate that) and they are not responsible for the quality of the product under test. In contrast, they are responsible only for the quality of their automated tests. All things considered, this approach is actually quite sustainable from a quality control perspective. Provided automated tests ...