Citrus

In some sense, testing can be more difficult than coding, as validating the efficiency of the test cases (i.e., the ‘goodness’ of your tests) can be much harder than validating code correctness. In practice, the tests are just executed without any validation beyond the pass/fail verdict. On the contrary, the code is (hopefully) always validated by testing. By designing and executing the test cases the result is that some tests have passed, and some others have failed. Testers do not know much about how many bugs remain in the code, nor about their bug-revealing efficiency.

I was once asked at a testing summit, “How do you manage a QA team using scrum?” After some consideration, I realized it would make a good article, so here I am. Understand that the idea behind developing software in a scrum environment is for development teams to self-organize.

When most firms employed a waterfall development model, it was widely joked about in the industry that Google kept its products in beta forever. Google has been a pioneer in making the case for in-production testing. Traditionally, before a build could go live, a tester was responsible for testing all scenarios, both defined and extempore, in a testing environment. However, this concept is evolving on multiple fronts today. For example, the tester is no longer testing alone. Developers, designers, build engineers, other stakeholders, and end users, both inside and outside the product team, are testing the product and providing feedback.

The best agile teams are built from people who work together as one unit, where each team member has both the technical and the personal skills to allow the team to become self-organized, cross-functional, and self-motivated. These are all big words that I hear in almost every agile project. Still, the criteria to make a fantastic agile team are practically impossible to achieve without one major factor: motivation towards a common goal.