Fascinating phenomenon noted by Kevin Rutherford at Silk and Spinach (post here). As he notes in his original post (here), a good tester (or testing team) can tempt developers to outsource all quality management to the testers.
However, because this is described as an “agile” project, I’m curious: What flavor of agile was used? It sounds like that the “bad code” developers were throwing code over the wall to their tester, which seems like a parody of a waterfall life-cycle.
The lack of details leads me to wonder how well the poorer-performing team was organized and led. Per Kevin Schlabach’s comment, I’d expect that testers would be in the sprint team already. That sounds like pretty standard practice. I wonder about the team dynamics as well. Lots of questions on that point:
- Where there interpersonal issues?
- How short were the effective iterations? In other words, did the poorer-performing team behave more like a waterfall team, waiting until the last possible moment to turn over code (or did the tester only accept code at that last possible moment)?
- Implied in Kevin S’s comment are questions about the relative strengths of the sprint/iteration teams. If the business team was working closely w/ developers, how did the tester end up testing so much crap code?
Filed under: Quality Management | Tagged: agile, agile development, iterative development, Kevin Rutherford, Kevin Schlabach, SCRUM, Silk and Spinach, Test Management, Testing | 2 Comments »
