Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams

Measuring and rating performance on an individual basis risks undermining team collaboration. We don’t want a programmer to feel she shouldn’t take on a testing task because she’s rated on delivering production code. We don’t want a system administrator to be so busy making sure her individual goals are met that she can’t help with a test environment problem.

Conversely, a good performer who was trying to work well with the team shouldn’t be knocked because the rest of the team didn’t pull together. This is a time when a manager needs to step up and help the team find its way. If major bugs made it to production, nobody should blame the testers. Instead, the whole team should analyze what happened and start taking steps to prevent a recurrence.

The development team needs to keep the business needs in mind. Set goals that serve the business, increase profitability, and make the customers happier. Work closely with the business so that your successes help the whole company succeed.

As we mentioned in Chapter 3, “Cultural Challenges,” celebrate every success, however small. A celebration might be a high-five, a company-provided lunch, or maybe just leaving work early to socialize a bit. The ScrumMaster on Lisa’s team hands out gold stars at stand-up meetings for special accomplishments. Acknowledge the people who help you and your team.

Teams can find novel ways to recognize each other’s contributions. Iteration review and demonstration meetings, where both the development team and customer team are present, are a good setting for recognizing both individual and team achievements.

Read about the “Shout-Out Shoebox” idea in Chapter 19, “Wrap Up the Iteration.”

What Can You Do?

If you’re a new tester on an agile team, especially a new agile team, what can you do to help the team overcome organizational challenges and succeed? How can you fit in with the team and contribute your particular skills and experience?

Put the ten principles we described in Chapter 2 to work. Courage is especially important. Get up and go talk to people; ask how you can help. Reach out to team members and other teams with direct communication. Notice impediments and ask the team to help remove them.

Agile development works because it gets obstacles out of our path and lets us do our best work. We can feel proud and satisfied, individually and as a team. When we follow agile principles, we collaborate well, use feedback to help improve how we work, and always look for new and better ways to accomplish our goals. All this means we can continually improve the quality of our product.

Summary

In this chapter, we looked at ways to build a team and a structure for successful agile testing and development.

Consider the importance of team structure; while testers might need an independent mind-set, putting them on a separate team can be counterproductive.

Testers need access to a larger community of testers for learning and trying out new ideas. QA teams might be able to create this community within their organization.

It is important for the whole team to be located together, to foster collaboration; if the team is distributed, provide tools to promote communication.

Hire for attitude.

There is no right tester–developer ratio. The right answer is, “It depends on your situation.”

Teams need to self-organize, identify and find solutions to their own problems, and look for ways to improve. They can’t wait for someone to tell them what to do.

Management should reward performance in a way that promotes the team’s effort to deliver business value but not penalize good individual performance if the team is struggling.

Testers can use agile principles to improve their own skills and increase their value to the team. They need to be proactive and find ways that they can contribute.

Chapter 5 Transitioning Typical Processes

There are many processes in a traditional project that don’t transition well to agile because they require heavyweight documentation or are an inherent part of the phased and gated process and require sign-offs at the end of each stage.