The challenges of testers & developers working together in a cross-functional Agile team

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Pinterest
WhatsApp

One of the significant changes while moving to Agile teams is that testers and developers are now part of the same team.

This change introduces great advantages, as well as some challenges.

The immediate impact is that the testers participate in the Scrum ceremonies and get a better exposure to the product under development, its status, and its fragility. They can therefore detect better potential areas for defect finding, gain better sync for when they’ll get a drop for testing, and can better utilize their plans.

It sometimes looks more like this:

What we are missing is that as much as this seems like great progress, it focuses on the tester’s local optimum. The mindset is still of a siloed test team that needs to utilize the tester resources better, rather than how to achieve the team’s product delivery goals with high quality and in a timely fashion.

The Agile team is not really a team yet. It is a mixture of people from different disciplines but they are not compounded as a team yet. This results in many times in testers that feel weakened, having lost their power of defending the product quality and of determining how and what to test. They are being told by the SM or Team/Tech Lead how much to test, usually just to minimize test overhead. They are being asked to document less, not to open defects when not needed, to test something that is still in progress, and their test manager is no longer in the teams to back them up. They feel abandoned!

This is a crucial period. I repeatedly see it during implementations and Agile testing workshops I run. On the one hand, the testers crave that the team will understand them and their quality needs, and on the other hand, the testers also need to change their mindset so they won’t impede this change from happening.

This is the place where SMs, Agile leads, and the whole team need to take a shared responsibility for quality and see how they can work it out together as a team. They need to encourage the testers to voice their opinion during Scrum ceremonies and to focus the team on minimizing the gap between testers and developers and how they all contribute to testing.

Yes, it is intimidating for developers. They didn’t join the company to test…they are developers! It is time to understand that the team should focus on their shared goals. Developers should get to know the tested system better, focus on unit testing, strengthen the automation testing, and assist with any setup or test planning that can make a better flow.

On the other hand, it is also intimidating to the testers. They need to change their mindset. They don’t trust the developers to do testing or to distinguish between a testing overhead and a risk. They don’t see the benefit of testing small batches of the product. It looks more like an inefficient plan of re-testing. They feel that if they won’t report, then no one will recognize their work. It is time for the testers to realize they have much more value to offer than to detect defects – they need to prevent them from the get-go, and they need to represent the user. They need to collaborate with the PO and the developers to identify problem areas before coding. They need to become test architects, guide the team, and promote these early and small batches to ensure they hold an end-to-end solution and are in the right direction. They should identify automation requirements and address them and gain trust in automation and in the team.

Adopting an Agile testing mindset and practices should make this movement and bring you to a higher scrum level:

A mindset change takes time. Moving testers into the agile teams is not a mechanical movement. It requires trust, collaboration, learning, the adoption of new practices and experiments, and persistence.

This is why we advise developers, SMs, managers, and team leads also to join our Agile testing workshop. Ultimately, it is not only about the testers but about testing. Yes, it requires leadership to build quality into Agile teams.

What about your challenges?
We’d be happy to help you in this transition. Our Agile Testing workshop is a good starting point. Hope to see you there.

Categories:

Tags:

Introduction to Test Driven Development
Lean and Agile Principles and Practices
Agile Exercises
LPM
Agile Product Development
What Is Kanban
Frameworks
Scrum Values
Agile Israel Events
RSA
Engineering Practices
Legacy Code
Limiting Work in Progress
Perfection Game
SA
Lean Agile Leadership
Certification
Agile Product Ownership
Lean Agile Management
Agile Games and Exercises
Agile Testing Practices
Product Management
Code
Lean-Agile Budgeting
Rapid RTC
Agile Project
Atlaassian
LeSS
Story Slicing
Operational Value Stream
Managing Risk on Agile Projects
Iterative Incremental Development
Agility
Agile Release Management
SPC
Managing Projects
Tips
Business Agility
Reading List
ScrumMaster Tales
Kanban 101
Scrum Master
QA
Coaching Agile Teams
TDD
Hybrid Work
POPM
Principles of Lean-Agile Leadership
Continuous Planning
GanttBan
Acceptance Test-Driven Development
Program Increment
An Appreciative Retrospective
Lean and Agile Techniques
Software Development Estimation
ART Success
EOS®
The Kanban Method
Artificial Intelligence
Continuous Delivery
ALM Tools
Continuous Improvement
Agile Risk Management
Kaizen Workshop
Process Improvement
Scrum Master Role
Sprint Iteration
Video
Agile Community
Agile Basics
Scrum.org
Entrepreneurial Operating System®
AI Artificial Intelligence
Daily Scrum
Effective Agile Retrospectives
Lean Agile Basics
System Integration Environments
Agile Release Planning
Covid19
speed @ scale
Agile
Legacy Enterprise
Scrum With Kanban
SAFe
Continuous Integration
Kanban Kickstart Example
LAB
Introduction to ATDD
Scaled Agile Framework
Agile Contracts Best Practices
SAFe DevOps
Professional Scrum Product Owner
System Archetypes
Risk Management on Agile Projects
Agile Techniques
Nexus
ARTs
Pomodoro Technique
RTE
Development Value Streams
AgileSparks
Lean Startup
ROI
Kanban Game
Nexus Integration Team
Lean-Agile Software Development
Continuous Deployment
Agile India
Presentation
Releases Using Lean
Advanced Roadmaps
Value Streams
Test Driven Development
Software Development
Scrum
Certified SAFe
Achieve Business Agility
Jira Plans
Kaizen
Sprint Planning
Jira Cloud
Sprint Retrospectives
WIP
Quality Assurance
Jira
Manage Budget Creation
Portfolio for Jira
Spotify
Systems Thinking
Planning
Games and Exercises
Accelerate Value Delivery At Scale
Lean Risk Management
DevOps
Agile Development
System Team
lean agile change management
Risk Management in Kanban
Scrum and XP
Scrum Guide
Kanban Basics
Agile for Embedded Systems
Scrum Primer
A Kanban System for Software Engineering
Lean Budgeting
Agile Program
PI Planning
Agile and DevOps Journey
Agile Outsourcing
ATDD
Amdocs
PI Objectives
IT Operations
Agile Games
The Agile Coach
ATDD vs. BDD
Professional Scrum with Kanban
Nexus and Kanban
Implementation of Lean and Agile
Nexus and SAFe
SAFe Release Planning
Large Scale Scrum
Agile Project Management
Product Ownership
Built-In Quality
Elastic Leadership
Nexus vs SAFe
BDD
Risk-aware Product Development
NIT
Lean Software Development
Change Management
Lean Agile Organization
Agile in the Enterprise
RTE Role
Lean Agile
Agile Marketing
Professional Scrum Master
speed at scale
Agile Mindset
Webinar
Implementing SAFe
Agile Assembly Architecture
Applying Agile Methodology
Agile Delivery
Self-organization
Enterprise DevOps
Release Train Engineer
Kanban
AgileSparks
Logo

Contact Us

Request for additional information and prices

AgileSparks Newsletter

Subscribe to our newsletter, and stay updated on the latest Agile news and events

This website uses Cookies to provide a better experience
Shopping cart