Wednesday, September 28, 2016

There Are No Agile Testers - Balancing the power

This is a follow-up on my posts regarding developer testing versus tester testing which came to the conclusion that rather than having a QA department or a micro QA embedded in an agile team in form of a number of testers I'd prefer to have developers taking on a QA and QC perspective in their day-to-day work. All of the posts negated the need for a QA department.

I intend to change my mind. A bit sort of. at least.

Feature vs. Quality

The situation that induced this partial change of mind I could observe over quite some time now. In an ideal world development teams would take on their responsibility for testing and a reasonable QA. There are places where this actually happens. And there are many more places where this turns out to be a challenge for the teams even if they are willing to do so.
In many shops development teams are faced with a high feature pressure imposed to them by product owners and/or management. Ever more features are requested and sold before they are built. Development teams get forced to deliver even if the quality of the features are not at a level that would suite their own standard. Nor does it fulfill the standard the customer expects.
The quality often is so poor that merely the happy path works. Any step aside would lead to trouble, meaning bugs being reported, adding to the ever increasing demands the development team has to keep up with. In the end the same people that force the team to deliver buggy software are the same people that complain about poor quality. Often I have been witness to conversations like:


PO: I want that feature end of week.
Dev: We are not able to deliver that soon. We're not done. There are some issues to tackle yet.
PO: Doesn't matter. I take the risk.


To be sure. The PO would say anything to get the pressure of his chest by delivery anything he could lay his hands on. He knows very well that he is not taking the risk at all. The development team will have to handle the outcome of the unduly risk taking.


The White Knight: QA

Here is where a QA department or QA stuff comes into play. Given the QA lead is equipped with the same prestige and rank as the management or product owners that force the development teams into bad behavior, the QA could serve as a support for development teams in their effort to ship quality software instead of premature features. The QA is there to balance the power sort of. Putting weight on the side of quality.
It is not about huge organizations of testers swarming out to test all the bugs out of the features. It is about a department that is able to define minimum quality standards and KPIs that have to be met before anything leaves development and that is able to enforce them.
Sure. This is adding pressure on the development teams from one side but reliefs them on the other side. QA will demand the minimum standards are met by development. And QA will prevent stuff from being shipped if the minimum standard is not fulfilled. Thus achieving what development teams are not able to achieve for lack of power.


Balance of Power
To sum up all of my posts: development teams have to do their testing themselves. It makes no sense to build micro silos within teams by adding testers that do testing and nothing else. There should be a convergence of tester and developer to better be able to load-balance within the teams according to the needs of the features to be built. However there are testers that turn into test enablers by providing test automation tools to the development teams or by educating developers with respect to testing. There may even be some testers that do some very specialized testing like user acceptance testing or usability testing. And finally some of the testing stuff will turn into QA - or remains there - to serve as a counterweight for over-ambitious product owners and managers.


So, finally I admit: There is a need for a QA team. A team to set standards and to enforce them. The obligation to fulfill these standards lies with the development teams. The tools and knowledge they need will be provided by former testers.




Read also:
On Coaching Agile - What I've learned from being an agile coach
On Sporadics - How to deal with intermittent tests in continuous delivery
The opinions expressed in this blog are my own views and not those of SAP