Optimising agile testing through collaboration. iSQI Certification Days Provides a few tips on how to enhance collaboration between testers and developers in an agile team

1. Optimising Agile Testing
through Collaboration
Fran O’Hara
Inspire Quality Services
Supporting Agile and Testing Transformation
fran.ohara@inspireqs.ie
www.inspireqs.ie

2. Inspire’s training for :
• Professional Scrum
Master™ exam
• Professional Scrum
Product Owner™ exam
ISTQB Accredited
training
• Foundation
• Agile tester
• Advanced test analyst
• Advanced test manager
What keeps me virtually busy…
Virtual Live Training
• Agile & Test Training
• Certification-based
• Customised
Virtual Live Mentoring
• Agile
• QA/Test
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3. Agile = Collaboration
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4. Who should be Collaborating?
Quality
Assurance
Development
Business
Agile
4
Operations
+
+ ?

5. Collaborative Team Culture
Whole team ownership of
quality
• Share common goals
• Cross functional – multiple
skill sets, diverse
perspectives, biases
• Collaborate and build
relationships across roles
and teams
• Learning culture – inspect
and adapt – continuous
improvement
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6. Collaboration approaches/tips
• Engage informally and build relationships inside and
outside of team, ask questions, ask for help &
feedback, offer help, provide encouragement, ask for
and share examples, ask to observe an event, etc.
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• Virtual team building to support collaboration:
• over communicate:
• limit email.. more real time, interpersonal
communication (video/conversation … turn
cameras on! and chat/messaging)
• informal/social interactions:
• coffee chats, morning group chats/checkins, bring
(virtual) food, virtual celebrations, virtual
games/activities, talent shows, happy hour MTV
cribs, opt-in exercise, do lunch in pairs, virtual
learning and development, etc
• psychological safety
• ‘oops wall’ to celebrate mistakes, creating
permission to be vulnerable, provide
encouragement, survey safety perception,…

7. Try a team
charter or canvas
to (re-)set the
context for team
collaboration
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8. = Collaboration
8
Collaboration approaches/tips
- (Virtual) Pairing

9. Agile = Collaboration
9
Talk is good – build quality in - prevent defects!
Challenging to create ‘good’ stories though
Social object in agile = User Story:
As a <user type>
I want <action>
so that <result/benefit>
… acceptance criteria/examples
Collaboration approaches/tips
- User stories: a tool for collaboration

10. User stories – INVEST criteria
• Valuable stories (vertical)
• Product owner understanding value
• Better business/technical collaboration
• Better delivery of customer value
• early and continuous feedback, incremental show and tell
• Easier communication of progress to stakeholders
• More flexible QA-Dev collab on each story
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Vertical slice image from Dave Neuman
Code
Test
Sprint 1
Code &
Bug Fix
• Small stories
• Product owner can prioritise stories for the sprint better
• Team can prioritise stories within the sprint better
• Better visibility of real progress
• Improves team motivation
• Better feedback
• E.g. incremental show and tell
• More whole team thinking/collaboration
• Avoids the mini-waterfall – QA issues

11. Collaboration approaches/tips
- Collaborating in Scrum events
• Product backlog refinement – shared understanding thru full team
collaboration to build quality in (3 amigos as primer to full team refinement)
• Sprint planning – joint solution design and task identification, risk analysis
and test approach, collaboration opportunities identified (Not siloed
BE/FE/QA story/tasks)
• Daily scrum – not silo reporting but team collaboration to plan work as a
team to complete stories and achieve the Sprint goal
• Retro – working together to learn & improve (inspect and adapt how well
the team is collaborating…. How we are moving towards our quality goals,
specific test practices/tools etc.), experiment
• Review/demo – collaborating with PO/Customer to improve product &
business outcomes and ongoing focus of QA
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12. Wrapping up…
Wrapping up…
Wrapping up…
Wrapping up…
Try…
• Vertical small user stories (use sprint planning to agree
testing for both developers and testers)
• Dev-QA pairing on stories
• Daily scrums - walk the board focusing on collective team
progress on stories versus individual tasks – ‘We’ versus ‘I’
• Building relationships, team building activities….
• Coaching individual team members - identifying those
specific behaviours that impact both positively and
negatively on collaboration
• Team Charter
• Team retrospectives – quality, test approach, collaboration

13. fran.ohara@inspireqs.ie
www.inspireqs.ie