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An organisation's decision to shift towards a more agile & lean software development often leaves Testers wondering where they fit; promises of all the testing being automated, the whole team owning quality & light documentation appear to take away everything that Testers hold close to their heart.

What I have personally seen is that the iterative development cycle of Agile has not yet managed to remove the need for Testers, but it has caused the roles & responsibilities of those doing the testing to change.

The shortened delivery cycle means that Testers cannot be afforded the time they once used to have for planning, executing & reporting their testing.

So how do Testers fit in this fast paced delivery cycle?

My answer is that they need to be more salmon (without the death).

Testers need to be involved further upstream in the development cycle – they need to focus on questioning whether we’re building the right thing as much as whether we’re building right.

They also need to understand what other testing is going on in the product they are helping to develop - Programmers are writing unit tests, what are they looking for? UX are running A/B & multivariant tests, why?