What’s this agile testing all about?

Unlike a waterfall-organized team for example, testers on an agile project play an important role during all the phases of the project lifecycle: 
1. During the planning phase of a project, agile testers do:
· Help the rest of the team understand the user stories 
· Only take on stories that can be fully tested by the end of the sprint 
· Collaborate with customers to better understand their stories 
· Collaborate with developers to make sure all have the same understanding 
· Start working on high level user acceptance tests for each story 
· Think about any test data or testing dependencies needed for story testing
2. When in coding and testing phase of the project, testers do:
· Write detailed tests once coding starts 
· Start with simple tests and add more complex ones later on 
· Complete tests for one story at a time 
· Identify testing obstacles as early as possible and communicate to team 
· Facilitate communication between the customers and developers for issues that arise from coding and testing 
· Write some manual tests for scenarios that are too difficult to automate with the automated agile testing tool in hand 
· Start automating tests once enough code is written for regression suite
3. During the final stage, and post-release testers take part in:
· Identifying testing related obstacles during sprint 
· Estimating if there was enough time to test all completed stories 
· Finding ways to improve next sprint 
· Demoing product to business owners for feedback
The agile development model involves testing as early as possible, and as often as working chunks of the software are released. This is usually done by using automated agile testing tools to minimize the amount of manual labor involved. Automated testing promotes regression tests that stimulate enhanced project velocity. While automated tests are critical for an agile development project, they are also essential for any other development methodology. 
There are a few things a tester should consider in order to decide what to automate for each sprint:
· Start with stories that do not have dependencies that can break your automated tests 
· Write the “happy path” test first and then expand to complex or edge scenarios 
· Estimate the complexity of a test case scenario and the potential regression value of its automation