Quality and the Agile World
What happens to the QA department when the company goes Agile? Some armchair Agilists believe that developers can test their own code. “QA will just slow down the developers and product launch”. Some say QA requires too much documentation that Agile now does away with. You may hear that Agile is very ad hoc and unstructured, where QA is more structured and process oriented.
Who’s selling that? And a better question is “who’s buying that”?
The Agile Manifesto states that Agile is a philosophy that values:
- Individuals & interactions before processes & tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change rather than just following a plan
Roles do change in an Agile world. Developers who are driven to tight deadlines are used to doing less in unit and systems testing and allowing the QA department to find the bugs. The problem with that mode of operation is that the timeline isn’t shorter. Instead, time is tied up and tangled in a cycle of code/fix.
In Agile, unit testing becomes more formalized. There will be tighter and faster collaboration amongst team members. No titles, rather, roles are introduced to drive Working Software and Response to Change, all according to the Manifesto.
Developers aren’t test experts. The historical test team is now in the position to assist the development team with defining and automating tests that developers can use beyond their current build. No more Development versus Quality Assurance – we are Individuals and Interactions.
QA expertise and skills embedded in the Agile framework will reduce the number of defects produced in a build. Quality professionals will always be addressing the interfaces, dependencies and linkages, but the tests will be more focused since the builds will be of higher quality.
Not even testers want to find a high number of messy bugs. Get those out of the way and focus on the enterprise. Reduce the thrashing and code fix cycles and continually improve with root cause analysis and addition of tests for the developer tool kit.