Testing Early, Testing Often for Greater Success in Agile SCRUM

In my experiences, I have found two different approaches taken towards testing in Agile SCRUM:

1. Testers creating test plans while interacting with BAs, as like in waterfall model, in the beginning of each sprint, and executing those tests once the development is done. In this model, testers and developers still managed to survive successfully in their own islands/worlds and things used to move. However, there is not much interaction and collaboration between developers and testers during development phase. There are chances of usual conflicts that happens in the world of development and testing.

1. Testers creating test plans with help of BAs, collaborating on test cases, related with user stories, with independent developers and following the approach of test early, test often. In this model, testers and developers collaborate on each user stories and become equal partners to deliver high quality user stories, and overall release. Testers help developers to write code to make sure that their test cases pass during testing phases. This is more of a sort of test-driven development. Testers and developers become stakeholders of equal importance and this reduces areas of conflicts between testers and developers. In this model, testers come up with all different and extensive test case scenarios based on discussions with BAs and developers, come of suite of test cases.

In above two approaches, the second one has lead to greater success. However, it goes back to how SCRUM masters facilitate the testing process in his SCRUM teams.