Note that this post is part of a series where I am ‘live blogging’ my way through the ministry of testing’s 30 days of Agile Testing challenge.
How do we manage testing and are we agile about it?
I work for a great manager – he also reads this blog, so you know I have no ulterior motives in saying that. Joking aside, I do work for a great manager and we have an approach to managing testing on our team that makes a lot of sense for the context we are in. Is it capital A Agile? Probably not, but we don’t work in a capital A kind of company. For the place that we work it is a great process. I meets the compromise between the realities of the world we are in and the things that are in the world we would like to be in. It takes where we are as a company and stretches us just a bit in the right direction. So what does it look like?
The testers all belong to a testing team, but we are also each involved with development teams on particular areas of the product. We are each responsible for and encouraged to grow and develop relationships on those teams. We try to integrate into the development teams and work with them on testing feature early on in the process. One of the things that we have done is to use group exploratory testing sessions to help us test early and test often, and give feedback to developers in lightweight ways. As much as possible the approach has been to have a distributed group of testers working with development teams on individual features but also collaborating and sharing experience together. We try to keep the process as lean as we can and work on close relationships between developers and testers.
This approach has worked fairly well and while it may not be Agile in a strict sense of that term, it illustrates an important agile principle which is to prioritize what works over strictly following a particular process.
offbeattesting 