Sreenivas Mothukuru

Quite often I see Agile teams where Test Engineers sit relatively idle during initial days of sprint and struggle hard to complete testing tasks towards the end of sprint. Although Scrum teams follow Agile principles and practices, still at times, teams experience huge delays in Development and Testing which result in spill over of user stories to next sprint or delay in release dates. Typically, Test Engineers focus on following activities during the first few days: 1.        Understanding User Stories 2.        Write Sprint Test Plan 3.        Authoring Test Cases 4.        Follow up on approvals (Test Plan & Test Cases) Test Engineers are supposed to allocate initial 20-25% of sprint duration for the above mentioned tasks and then start Test Execution & Reporting. Mostly, Test Engineers author Test Plan, Test Cases and wait till Programmers del...

Article written by Sreenivas Mothukuru After working for many years on projects developed using Agile (Scrum) I came up with below sprint checklist (3 week sprint). Please go over below items and help me fine tune the checklist. Thank you! Before Sprint Starts 1 Book conference room for backlog grooming meeting 2 Review prioritized user stories in product backlog before attending backlog grooming meeting 3 Attend backlog grooming meeting 4 Book conference room for sprint planning meeting Day 1 5 Review user stories in sprint backlog before planning meeting 6 Come up with Dev tasks for (already groomed) user stories 7 Come up with QA tasks for (already groomed) user stories 8 To come up with QA and Dev estimates 9 Identify (module/code) dependencies 10 Attend sprint planning meeting 11 Come up with t...

Article written by   Sreenivas Mothukuru Anybody can develop software applications but only QA can better test and certify applications. During QA validation test engineers perform various types of tests to ensure developed application is as per the requirements/specifications. The tests include manual checks to some extent and automation then onwards. Now days the term "automation" has gained lot of significant in Software Industry. Most of the Software professional’s know automaton as some kind of testing done at browser level. At Browser level automation QA engineers automate repetitive tasks and test operations performed on the web browser. Test Engineers have to constantly adapt and modify the script if the web page layout changes. Good number of tools such as QTP, Silk Test, Selenium, etc. support automation. But, are we doing good job testing web applications only at browser level? The answer is   NO . This approach is like taking same pill for any illness! Cho...