At Fintal we realise that quality engineering and testing are not separate phases, but an integral part of software development, along with requirements gathering and coding withing the agile sprint. At Fintal our teams use a “whole-team” approach. Testers or SDETs on agile teams lend their expertise in eliciting examples of desired behavior from customers, collaborating with the development team to turn those into executable specifications that guide coding. Testing and coding are done incrementally and interactively, building up each feature until it provides enough value to release to production.
Traditional testing methodologies (often employed in the Waterfall model of software development) usually involve a two-team, two-phase process in which the development team builds the product to as near perfection as possible. The software product is delivered late in the software development life cycle at which point the test team strives to find as many bugs/errors as possible.
In contrast with these traditional methodologies, Agile testing focuses on identifying and repairing defects immediately, rather than waiting for the end of the release. When testing occurs at the tail end of a project, it can sometimes be sacrificed in terms of duration and quality to meet critical schedules and budget restrictions.