Chapter 40. Testing Is a Team Sport
Lisa Crispin
Cross-functional, self-organizing teams have super powers to bake quality into their product. Diversity is a boost to innovation. Engaging people with different skill sets, experiences, and unconscious biases is a great way to solve any kind of problem. If you have a problem related to testing, if testing is a bottleneck, or if your product quality sucks, make it a team problem to solve.
As a Team, Commit to Your Desired Level of Quality
Testing is a team sport. Get your whole delivery team together, talk about the level of quality you want to deliver to your customers, and commit to achieving that level. Make that a meaningful commitment—don’t let the inevitable roadblocks tempt you into lowering your quality.
Design Small Experiments for Your Biggest Problems
Use frequent retrospectives to identify the biggest quality problem for your team at that moment. Get a capable facilitator so everyone has a voice. Many books are available to help you facilitate such retrospectives effectively, including Agile Retrospectives (Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2006) by Diana Larsen and Esther Derby.
Design a small experiment to chip away at that biggest quality problem—notice how many problems are related to quality. Write a hypothesis that includes your expected outcome and how you will measure progress. (I recommend Linda Rising’s videos talking about small experiments to get you started.) Check progress frequently. Continue, tweak, or abandon as needed.
Make Problems Visible
The first step in solving any problem is to make it visible. Use big, visible charts to encourage conversations about testing issues. Be creative: stick a big red card on a storyboard, make a heat map showing areas of the product where defects are escaping into production, use a big wall monitor display that indicates problems with changing color, and even—as more than one of my own teams has done—use a flashing police light for bad failures.
Visuals are a great way to promote collective ownership of quality and testing. Keep using visuals as you work together to solve problems. Draw, write, and move things around together while you talk.
Keep Talking
Conversations among team members with different specialties should happen continually as you learn from production use of your product and start building new features to fill customer needs. Practices like Three Amigos meetings and example mapping help build shared understanding of features and stories before development starts. Including testing specialists and other good question-askers up front helps shorten cycle times while avoiding “big design up front.”
Take It Slow
Focus on quality, not speed. Guide development with executable tests that become a safety net and living documentation. Teams that feel confident to change their code find a steady cadence.
Remember: no story is done until it’s tested. Limit your work in progress; focus on finishing one story at a time. If testing feels like a bottleneck, plan fewer stories next Sprint. Make testing tasks—which any team member can take on—visible. Pair and mob to transfer testing skills to one another.
Nurture a learning environment where it’s safe to fail. Remember your team commitment to quality every day. Be patient and take baby steps. You’ll enjoy your work and you’ll delight your customers with high-quality, high-value features.