“Iteration Kickoff”
- Most teams kickoff their new iteration with a planning session. – where they discuss one story at a time, writing & estimating all of the tasks needed to implement it.
- Task cards need to be written along with development task cards and estimated realistically.
- When writing programming task cards, make sure that coding task estimates include time for writing unit tests and for all necessary testing by programmers.
- Testers should help make sure that all necessary cards are written and they have reasonable estimates.
Your job as a tester is to make sure enough time is allocated to testing and to remind the team that testing & quality are the responsibility of the whole team. When the team decides how many stories they can deliver in an iteration, the question isn’t “How much coding can we finish?” but “How much coding and testing can we complete?”
Commit Conservatively – It is always better to bring in another story later than to drop a picked story.
- Working closely with customers or customer proxies is one of the most important activities as an agile tester. Good communication usually takes work.
- We want “big-picture” tests to help the programmers get started in the right direction on a story. High level tests should convey the main purpose behind the story.
- Don’t forget to ask the programmers what they think you might have missed. What are the high-risk areas of the code? Where do they think testing should be focused?
When Testability is an issue, make it the team’s problem to solve.
One beneficial side-effect of reviewing the tests with programmers is the cross-learning that happens.
High level test cases along with executable tests you’ll write during the iteration will form the core of the application’s documentation.
People unfamiliar with agile development often have the misconception that there’s no documentation. In fact, agile projects produce usable documentation that contains executable tests and thus, is always up to date.
testwithnishi 
Love this advice: Commit Conservatively – It is always better to bring in another story later than to drop a picked story.
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