First, I help teams understand the goal of agile testing and how it differs from Waterfall testing. We discuss the product we are building and the level of effort we expect to include in a Scrum setting. We also discuss testing roles and responsibilities. For example, I help teams understand that quality is a shared responsibility. I lean on professional testers for their expertise and let them know we will look to them for guidance during sprints.
During a sprint, I encourage teams to order their tasks so that several of the features are ready for testing early in the sprint. I find that dropping everything on the testing team right at the end of a sprint typically results in stories being carried over to the next sprint. It stresses testers out and creates large swings in the velocity of the team.
Finally, I encourage teams to look for ways to automate testing. We try to target automating testing for functions that are repeatable or have the potential for a high level of negative business impact if they fail.
