You're tasked with testing agile software. How can you ensure quality and validation every step of the way?

Early Engagement is a key success builder. Its a challenge because you often want to actually have something to discuss and the earlier the engagement on quality the harder it is to have concrete conversations. But this is where the important conversations happen. Decide what quality level you want to achieve and how you are going to get there. Then and only then does "Testing" become a relevant topic. Remember the key questions - What, Why, When, Who and How? Get them clearly answered and move on from there. Conversations about CI/CD - Unit/Automation etc can wait a little while.

Ensuring Quality by involving testers in early in planning to understand the requirements. To ensure quality and validation in manual testing within an agile framework, involve testers early in planning to understand requirements. Develop detailed test cases aligned with user stories and acceptance criteria. Perform exploratory testing to uncover hidden issues and engage in frequent communication through daily stand-ups and sprint reviews. Conduct regression testing to ensure new changes don’t impact existing functionality. Regularly review and refine test plans based on feedback and retrospectives to maintain high-quality standards throughout the development process.

Testers should be involved in various initial discussions around refining the requirements, consolidating the UX designs, how the technical solution would look like considering with their critical mindset, testers not only would contribute on different aspects of quality assistance but also could foreseen the problems and risk which can diminish the value of product.

In Agile, you can attend meetings, set your sprints, and discuss work with your team to gain clarity on tasks. As a team lead, use meeting discussions and a thorough understanding of the project to plan your strategies effectively and you should be there for every meetings related to project so you will gain more insight about your work status and we could achieve clients deadline in a more effective way so yes agile would be helpfull in this scenarios.

Testing all the time is a great idea if you are building new SW all the time and you are doing something triggered on the outcome of the continuous testing. And I would definately advacate this as an approach all things being equal. But if you are resource limited, dont change all your SW frequently and cant act on the outcome of a failed test imediately - you are just burning electricity. If thats the case, you need to concentrate on the areas that give you the most issues and work out how to remove those defects BEFORE they corrupt the main codebase and this is IMO where code complexity, stds and other automation tools measuring the code as its constructed will play a bigger and more effective role.

In this modern era of software development where organization are focusing on delivering the features continuously and frequently, it is utmost important that various testing stages are added in software delivery life cycle. Exploratory testing plays a key role but also good coverage of unit/component, service and UI automated checks could be a part of every committed change so the test are running continuously and the feedback from those brings the confidence in the product.

Don't be the worst automator of useless checks but focus on automation checks which brings the most value. Some ideas for choosing the right candidate for automated checks: - Focus on developing the API/service test. Never go with the UI test automation first, start with integration layer. - Regression and repeatable test. - Bases on discussion with the team, mark the candidates for automated checks for new features so those can be worked in next iteration. - Analytics results. - Production bug.