What are THIS testers tasks?

When I got a comment on my last post, I realised that I had to make myself more clear on some assumptions. Some of them were made on things that I have been thinking about lately, but not discussed with very many people. And I havent blogged about it.

Project

In any project, there are things you need to get done for the project to succeed. In software projects in particular, my view on success is when the software developed brings value to someone of importance. Projects have a budget, usually in money, time or labour of some sort. These have to be distributed among people/equipment to achieve a set of tasks until value is brought by the system.

People

Software development is a huge domain with lots and lots of different people that are concerned by the software that is developed. We usually call them stakeholders, direct or indirect stakekholders. Indirect stakeholders is pretty much any person on the planet since we are living in our small ecosystem called earth. In software projects we usually only refer to the closest indirect stakeholders and the direct ones. All stakeholders usually have roles within or around the software project.

Roles

Human beings need to have labels/folders in our brain to function in a normal way. Otherwise we would be overwhelmed by information if for example every person we meet required its own folder since we are unique. In software development we have a whole lot of roles. Usually everyone can envision people with specific roles doing certain things within a project. Some examples of roles would be (in no special order):

Programmer, Usability expert, Line manager, Architect, Tester, Third party vendor, Configuration manager, Project manager, Scrum master, QA, Customer, Product owner, Business analyst, Test manager, Developer, Requirements analyst, End-user, Designer, Test automation expert, DBA, HR, Project funder

As you can see, from the top of my head I got a good amount of software development roles that are involved in or surrounding projects. I also assume that no project have all of these roles defined.

Tasks

What is really important in a project is the tasks that need to be done for the software to deliver value. There are many ways to organize, visualize and manage task flow in a project. Usually certain roles or people are tied or expected to do to certain types of tasks. But in the agile context, anyone within a team should be able to do any task. That includes all types of people that are on the team. But is this the best thing to do? Should a usability expert write database queries? The product owner develops the back-end API? The tester helps the customer to write down user stories or acceptance tests?

Which tasks are included in a role definition?

Context, context, context! Of course the tasks that need to be done for a software system to start delivering value varies for every project. The people included in a team also vary, which means that knowledge and skills are different in all contexts as well.

The tester role

When I talk about the tester role in a project team, I usually refer to a person that fulfills and executes the tasks needed to achieve quality of delivered software. Those tasks are usually a good blend of tasks associated with QA, test automation, BA, testing, configuration management etc. But what tasks are expected from a tester like that? That question needs a context.

CHALLENGE!

This is my question to you, please take this one as a challenge!

The project is a member and event registration system with backend, customised member browsing that relies on login privilegies, data uploading, invoicing interfaces towards economy system, customisable registration forms that deliver data separately towards the main system, email template creation and sending etc. You got the point.

Project team consists of 6 people for 20 weeks, in 2 week iterations. One of these is a dedicated tester. The customer is an organisation that has regular members and every now and then organises these events. There is a dedicated person within this organisation that is responsible for this project investment.

What should a developer in this project expect from the tester?

What do you think a developer usually expects from the tester?

What kind of skills are required by the tester?

What kind of tasks will the tester do? Start/mid/end of the project?

As a somewhat inspiration to your answers, take a look at this post by Michael Alexander, where he brings up what testers should be good at, but how should the skill set be used in this project?