So I work in a so called agile team of 5 people, where on of the members has the role of tester. Now this person doesn't have much technical experience, if any, in regards to coding, so the purpose of the tester is primarily to fo automated UI tests and system testing. Am I in the wrong for questioning the importance and relevance of this role, or is it just because in my previous work experience, the developers had the responsibility for testing whatever was made, and I just have to get used to this new way of working?

The devs should not be the ones who test because they make the same wrong assumptions when testing that they also already made when coding.

Of course, you still do some tests before you check in your stuff, but that's more the debugging kind of tests.

Devs should always test their own work, but a good automation tester will write test suites for regression and E2E scenarios, and sometimes go further and create business use cases (act as a business user not as a system tester) to make sure what you touch doesn't impact something else along the line.

An automation tester without some kind of technical background is probably doing manual testing and you'll probably get more out of you're TDD / BDD tests anyway.

@Fast-Nop I'd expect a Dev to cover the happy paths at a minimum.

@Fast-Nop this actually makes complete sense. But I think I just question it because of their lack of technical experience, meaning everything has to sort of be served to them. A lot of times I feel like they ask "is this something that I should test" and maybe that's ok to ask? However, honestly I'm just a developer who makes stuff and try to ensure that they work, so I suppose there are still alot that I just have to learn as well in a corporate sense of doing things.

@Xonuss Testing is generally difficult with agile because testing is about discovering discrepancies between spec and implementation - only that you don't have a spec in agile.

The testers need to have some way to know how the system is expected to behave.

Could serve as an entry role to transition into a dev if they so choose as they gain more experience.

Devs automate some tests, testers others test.
Basically you test the things you do work, the tester tests it as a black box .

Under your logic QA wouldn't be a thing.

@mundo03 It's not my logic, company I work for does this... I don't necessarily agree with this approach.

It depends if the person is actually caring about its job or not. QA without much of a technical understanding can point to bad design, performance issues etc but it takes effort to decrypt from their feedback cause they cant explain in the terms you expect. Just see the person as your user number 1. I made so many decisions that i considered to be good but which were never adopted by users but looking back our QA whined a lot during the development so it was more my mistake and in the end I usually needed to design feature from scratch and implement it after.