| | October 20168CIOReviewLeading Agile Testers and Testing in at Scale ContextsOver the past 20 years, I have had the opportunity to work at many startups and created several QA/Test departments from scratch. Over this same time period, software development methodologies have changed. And I've learned that creating a QA department from scratch in a waterfall world was a lot easier than in an agile world. In a waterfall world, I had nearly complete autonomy to the processes we put in place, the tools we used, and the people I hired. Things changed radically for me when I transitioned to agile. In agile, my testers are now part of Scrum or Kanban teams. Among other things, the testing practices I want to implement have to be taught to the entire Scrum team. The tools I want to use need to gain buy-in from the whole team. And the people I want to hire have to be vetted and approved by the team. Needless to say, it has been a learning experience in how to lead agile testers and agile testing in at scale contexts. My first major learning is that consistency at scale matters between testing processes on Scrum teams. When I say "at scale", it implies leading testers on 10 or more Scrum teams. What I have learned is that while we want to keep Scrum teams together as long as possible it is not always an option. Having the ability to move testers from one Scrum team to another, or swap out testers because they just don't "fit" in their team, is a necessity. To achieve this consistency, you need to set standards across Scrum teams regarding testing. This could mean at minimum the teams have a risk based test plan template and standards, they write test cases in the same tool as all the other testers, and they do automation is the same framework. Most of these items should be included in your organizational definition-of-done, but how the DoD is implemented is what I mean here. It's important in at scale contexts for it to be consistent across all the Scrum teams.By Mary Thorn, Director of Quality, IpreoIN MY OPINIONMary Thorn
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