Tips to be better as a Test Engineer in Highly Agile and Complex Environments

Test Engineers already are great and do their best to keep bugs and defects aways from products and services. Here are some tips I have learnt over the years that will just help them to be better. If you already know them then make sure you tell them to a Test Engineer you meet/talk with to make him/her also succeed. 

So here are the tips:

1. In daily scrums just don't listen the updates but think what you have on your plate for the day. Make it clear if something is ambiguous.
2. Adding a leaked defect to test suite does not help alone. A post-mortem of the cause of defect leakage for sure does.
3. Integrate Test Reporting with IMs for instant and hassle free report viewing.
4. Create bugs for any doubtful functionality or behavior.
5. Be proactive in communicating problems, achievements etc.
6. Estimate story points for each Testing Ticket so that you get ample time to test it.
7. Before automating or testing make sure your test data is accurate and can be prepared easily when needed. First apply effort in making test data creation faster and reliable.
8. Always communicate the test coverage to all stakeholders regularly.
9. Discuss with senior engineers and leads out of your immediate team also to find out ways to improve processes, tests, infrastructure etc.
10. Make a point to learn one new thing per day.
11. Be bold and speak out any thing that needs to be known to the team or stakeholders.
12. Build documentation with the code in form of inline statements etc. 
13. Take opportunities to mentor new team members.
14. Remember planning and strategizing is always welcome even if the time provided is minimal. Prioritization can make your life much easier here.
15. Fast and close communication with Devs is the fastest way to get a bug resolved.
16. Think retrospectives as the time when you are playing judge of the process/project and have to suggest improvements and tell about shortcomings fluently.
17. Give advance notice of personal time off etc for team to plan ahead. 
18. Mark your absence as "OOO" next to your name in present day messaging systems like Slack, Hipchat etc.
19. Create personal notifiers or bots that notify you when something related to your area of expertise is being talked about at Instant Messaging Systems.
20. Enjoy and do team outings! Make Testing Fun!