Crispin, Lisa - Agile Testing - A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams

Part II Organizational Challenges

When software development organizations implement agile development, the testing or QA team often takes the longest to make the transition. Independent QA teams have become entrenched in many organizations. When they start to adapt to a new agile organization, they encounter cultural differences that are difficult for them to accept. In Part II, we talk about introducing change and some of the barriers you might encounter when transitioning to agile. Training is a big part of what organizations making the transition need, and it’s often forgotten. It’s also hard to see how existing processes such as audits and process improvement frameworks will work in the agile environment. Going from an independent QA team to an integrated agile team is a huge change.

Chapter 4, “Team Logistics,” talks about the team structure, such as where a tester actually fits into the team, and the never-ending question about tester-developer ratio. We’ll also talk about hiring testers and what to look for in a successful agile tester.

Traditional testing activities, such as logging bugs, keeping track of metrics, and writing test plans, might not seem like a good fit in an agile project. We introduce some of the typical processes that might need special care and attention and discuss how to adapt existing quality processes.

You can expect to find ways that testers and test teams accustomed to a traditional waterfall type of development environment can change their organizational structure and culture to benefit from and add value to agile development.

Chapter 3 Cultural Challenges

Many organizational influences can impact a project, whether it uses an agile or a traditional phased or gated approach. Organizational and team culture can block a smooth transition to an agile approach. In this chapter, we discuss factors that can directly affect a tester’s role on an agile team.

Organizational Culture

An organizational culture is defined by its values, norms, and assumptions. An organization’s culture governs how people communicate, interrelate, and make decisions, and it is easily seen by observing employee behavior.

The culture of an organization can impact the success of an agile team. Agile teams are best suited for organizations that allow independent thinking. For example, if a company has a hierarchical structure and encourages a directive management style for all its projects, agile teams will probably struggle. Past experiences of the organization will also affect the success of a new agile team. If a company tried agile and had poor results, people will be suspicious of trying it again, citing examples of why it didn’t work. They might even actively campaign against it.

Organizational culture is too frequently not considered when attempts are made to implement an agile process, leaving people wondering why it didn’t work as promised. It’s hard to change established processes, especially if individuals feel they have a stake in the status quo. Each functional group develops a subculture and processes that meet their needs. They’re comfortable with the way they work. Fear is a powerful emotion, and if it is not addressed, it can jeopardize the transition to agile. If team members feel that a new agile process threatens their jobs, they’ll resist the change.

We’ll talk specifically about how organizational culture affects testers working in an agile environment. The bibliography contains resources that deal with other cultural aspects that may affect teams.

Quality Philosophy

Consider an organization’s quality philosophy in terms of how it determines the acceptable level of software quality. Does it tolerate poor quality? Does it take customers’ quality requirements into account, or is it just concerned with getting the product into the customers’ hands as fast as it can?

When an organization lacks an overall quality philosophy and pressures teams to get the product out without regard to quality, testers feel the pinch. A team that tries to use agile development in such an environment faces an uphill battle.

Some organizations have strong, independent test teams that wield a lot of power. These teams, and their managers, might perceive that agile development will take that power away. They might fear that agile runs contrary to their quality philosophy. Evaluate your organization’s quality philosophy and the philosophy of the teams that enforce it.

Peril: Quality Police Mentality

If an existing QA team has assumed the role of “Quality Police,” its members usually enforce quality by making sure code reviews are completed and bugs are religiously entered into the defect-tracking systems. They keep metrics about the number of bugs found, and then are charged with making the final decision as to whether to release the product.

We’ve talked to testers who brag about accomplishments such as going over a development manager’s head to force a programmer to follow coding standards. We’ve even heard of testers who spend their time writing bugs about requirements that aren’t up to their standards. This kind of attitude won’t fly on a collaborative agile team. It fosters antagonistic behavior.

Another risk of the “Quality Police” role is that the team doesn’t buy into the concept of building quality in, and the programmers start using testers as a safety net. The team starts communicating through the bug-tracking system, which isn’t a very effective means of communicating, so the team never “jells.”

Read on for ways to help avoid this peril.

Companies in which everyone values quality will have an easier time transitioning to agile. If any one group has assumed ownership of quality, they’ll have to learn to share that with everyone else on the team in order to succeed.

Whole-Team Ownership of Quality

In Chapter 1, “What Is Agile Testing, Anyway?,” we talked about the whole-team approach to quality. For many testers and QA teams, this means a mind shift from owning quality to having a participatory role in defining and maintaining quality. Such a drastic shift in attitude is difficult for many testers and QA teams.

Testers who have been working in a traditional setting might have a hard time adjusting to their new roles and activities. If they’ve come from an organization where development and QA have an adversarial relationship, it may be difficult to change from being an afterthought (if thought of at all) to being an integral part of the team. It can be difficult for both programmers and testers to learn to trust each other.

Skills and Adaptability

Much has been observed about programmers who can’t adapt to agile practices—but what about testers who are used to building test scripts according to a requirements document? Can they learn to ask the questions as the code is being built? Testers who don’t change their approach to testing have a hard time working closely with the rest of the development team.

Testers who are used to doing only manual testing through the user interface might not understand the automated approach that is intrinsic to agile development. These testers need a lot of courage in order to face their changing roles, because changing means developing new skill sets outside their comfort zones.

Factors that Help

Although there are many cultural issues to consider, most QA teams have a focus on process improvement, and agile projects encourage continuous improvements and adaptability through the use of tools like retrospectives. Most quality assurance professionals are eager to take what they’ve learned and make it better. These people are adaptable enough to not only survive, but to thrive in an agile project.