Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams

In an ideal world, our customers are available to us all day, every day. In reality, many teams have limited access to their business experts, and in many cases, the customers are in a different location or time zone. Do whatever you can to have face-to face conversations. When you can’t, conference calls, phone conversations, emails, instant messages, cameras, and other communication tools will have to substitute. Fortunately, more tools to facilitate remote communication are available all the time. We’ve heard of teams, such as Erika Boyer’s team at iLevel by Weyerhaeuser, that use webcams that can be controlled by the folks in the remote locations. Get as close to you can to direct conversation.

Lisa’s Story

I worked on a team where the programmers were spread through three time zones and the customers were in a different one. We sent different programmers, testers, and analysts to the customer site for every iteration, so that each team member had “face time” with the customers at least every third iteration. This built trust and confidence between the developer and customer teams. The rest of the time we used phone calls, open conference calls, and instant messages to ask questions. With continual fine-tuning based on retrospective discussions, we succeeded in satisfying and even delighting the customers.

—Lisa

Even when customers are available and lines of communication are wide open, communication needs to be managed. We want to talk to each member of the customer team, but they all have different viewpoints. If we get several different versions of how a piece of functionality should work, we won’t know what to code. Let’s consider ways to get customers to agree on the conditions of satisfaction for each story.

Advance Clarity

If your customer team consists of people from different parts of the organization, there may be conflicting opinions among them about exactly what’s intended by a particular story. In Lisa’s company, business development wants features that generate revenue, operations wants features that cut down on phone support calls, and finance wants features that streamline accounting, cash management, and reporting. It’s amazing how many unique interpretations of the same story can emerge from people who have differing viewpoints.

Lisa’s Story

Although we had a product owner when we first implemented Scrum, we still got different directives from different customers. Management decided to appoint a vice president with extensive domain and operations knowledge as the new product owner. He is charged with getting all of the stakeholders to agree on each story’s implications up front. He and the rest of the customer team meet regularly to discuss upcoming themes and stories, and to agree on priorities and conditions of satisfaction. He calls this “advance clarity.”

—Lisa

A Product Owner is a role in Scrum. He’s responsible not only for achieving advance clarity but also for acting as the “customer representative” in prioritizing stories. There’s a downside, though. When you funnel the needs of many different viewpoints through one person, something can be lost. Ideally, the development team should sit together with the customer team and learn how to do the customer’s work. If we understand the customer’s needs well enough to perform its daily tasks, we have a much better chance of producing software that properly supports those tasks.

Janet’s Story

Our team didn’t implement the product owner role at first and used the domain experts on the team to determine prioritization and clarity. It worked well, but the achieving consensus took many meetings because each person had different experiences. The product was better for it, but there were trade-offs. The many meetings meant the domain experts were not always available for answering questions from the programmers, so coding was slower than anticipated.

There were four separate project teams working on the same product, but each one was focused on different features. After several retrospectives, and a lot of problem-solving sessions, each project team appointed a Product Owner. The number of meetings was cut down significantly because most business decisions were made by the domain experts on their particular project. Meetings were held for all of the domain experts if there were any differences of opinion, and the Product Owner facilitated bringing consensus on an issue. Decisions were made much faster, the domain experts were more available for answering questions by the team, and were able to keep up with the acceptance tests.

—Janet

However your team chooses to bring together varying viewpoints, it is important that there is only “one voice of the customer” presented to the team.

We said that product owners provide conditions of satisfaction. Let’s look more closely at what we mean.

Conditions of Satisfaction