Amateur, Untrained, Unmotivated - and Agile?
Recently, I was reading an article on James Bach's blog titled "
Test Jumpers: One Vision of Agile Testing". It's an interesting article and like most of James' writing, it was thought-provoking. The notion of a "Test Jumper" (he compares it to the elite firefighters known as Smoke Jumpers), is intriguing, and seems like a lot of fun.
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There was one point that really caught me eye though. In this article, James wrote:
"The value of a role like this arises because in a typical dedicated Agile situation, everyone is expected to help with testing, and yet having staff dedicated solely to testing may be unwarranted. In practice, that means everyone remains chronically an amateur tester, untrained and unmotivated."
When I asked him to write a bit more about this point, he replied:
"This has been a longstanding philosophical difference between the programmer-dominated culture of Agile and the culture of skilled testers. Attitudes vary from place to place, of course. But what I'm saying is that to do any technical activity well you must study and strive to improve. If you are focused on programming, you study that. If you are focused on testing, you study that. It is possible to study both, but programming is so interesting and all-consuming that it is VERY rare for a programmer to study testing to any great degree.
Some of them seem to be offended when I say that. I think that's because they honestly don't realize how deep I am speaking when I speak of studying. Many of them seem to see little worth learning in the testing sphere."
At my company, we are about to embark on several projects that for the first time will be Agile. I'm worried about the quality bar and the tester role in these projects, so I'll be on the lookout for the problems that James warns about.
I will be assigning professional Testers to the projects, but for at least one of them this is only a part-time assignment. I'm hoping that this will provide sufficient testing, but the Agile Team themselves will be deciding how the testing tasks are divided up, and how much professional and amateur time is devoted to testing versus all the other activities that must take place.
For those of you with Agile Testing experience:
- Do you agree with James' assessment?
- Are you doing anything to counter that trend?
- Any other suggestions?
I hope to write a follow-up a few months down the road as these projects progress.
This article originally appeared in my blog:
All Things Quality
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My name is Joe Strazzere and I'm currently a Director of Quality Assurance.
I like to lead, to test, and occasionally to write about leading and testing.
Find me at http://AllThingsQuality.com/.
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