Am I an Agile Tester?

I've often wondered if there's such a thing as an 'Agile Tester' or am I just a Tester who happens to work in an Agile Development environment. Having read countless blogs and based on my own experiences, I've come to the conclusion that the 'Agile Tester' really does exist. Let me explain...

The Agile Tester
As a Tester, you guide the development team in a way that ensures each user story/feature of the product behaves as intended and without bugs.

Agile Testers work with Product Managers and Owners to get a clear and common understanding of each feature in a way that everyone on the team is speaking the same language. An important step in this understanding is communicating how we know when a feature is done.

The Tester completes the requirement gathering in the form of test cases and once there is enough to be tested, checks the feature against these and carries out additional exploratory testing of the feature. The purpose of the exploratory testing is: 1) to understand the feature and how it is implemented, 2) to find additional or unexpected behavior, and 3) to refine and define additional test cases for the user story.

Unexpected behavior is discussed with Developers and Product Owners before deciding what to do about them. Often they are simply refinements on the original idea but they can also be either needed or unneeded additional functionality. Sometimes they are also just plain bugs. By addressing these refinements and making sure they are what the product owner or customer wants, we minimize the risk of creating the wrong product.

By testing early and often, Testers provide an early feedback to Product Mangers and Developers about whether the user story is on track or not. By further developing test cases based on exploratory testing, Testers define the intended product behavior as an "executable specification".

This is not the traditional approach - This is agile.

The Agile Tester does exist : - )

Ray