Roles and Competencies
Lisa Crispin & Janet Gregory
ePlan Services Inc & DragonFire Inc
This eBook contains chapter 3, ‘Roles and Competencies’, from the testing book ‘More Agile Testing: Learning Journeys for the Whole Team’. Here the authors describe how teams that succeed in creating high-quality software include people in a variety of roles and with a wide range of competencies. You need to form ways to get the ones you need on your team.
Key Takeaways:
- Teams whose members have a variety of T-shaped skill sets succeed with testing in fast-changing environments.
- All team members need broad agile testing basics, allowing them to collaborate well for improving quality, but each one may contribute a different deep, specialized skill.
- Testers communicate better with programmers, business analysts, product owners, managers, DevOps practitioners, and other team members when they know the basic concepts of those other specialities.
- Hire team members who are passionate about quality and learning, whose T-shaped skills complement each other’s.
- Set realistic expectations for new hires, and build in visibility and feedback.
About Me!
Lisa Crispin is dedicated to helping agile teams and testers discover good ways to deliver the best possible product. She specializes in showing testers and agile teams how testers can add value and how to guide development with business-facing tests. Her mission is to bring agile joy to the software testing world and testing joy to the agile development world. Lisa joined her first agile team in 2000, having enjoyed many years working as a programmer, analyst, tester, and QA director. Since 2003, she’s been a tester on a Scrum/XP team at ePlan Services, Inc. She frequently leads tutorials and workshops on agile testing at conferences in North America and Europe.
Janet Gregory is the founder of DragonFire Inc., an agile quality process consultancy and training firm. Her passion is helping teams build quality systems. For the past ten years, she has worked as a coach and tester introducing agile practices into both large and small companies. Her focus is working with business users and testers to understand their role in agile projects. Janet is a frequent speaker at agile and testing software conferences, and she is a major contributor to the North American agile testing community.