Augmenting the Agile Team – A Testing Success Story
Mike Hrycyk
PQA Testing
Today, three things are undeniable facts; business—projects are becoming more agile, teams are learning to function well remotely, and the tester’s role is evolving. Mike Hrycyk believes that testers in agile teams face daunting challenges and often struggle to keep up with the pace of new feature development while performing all the needed regression testing activities. Mike offers a strategy as an alternate path: the creation of a regression testing team to augment feature teams, one that works in parallel, handling the testing regression cycle while the feature teams—developers and testers—continue to work through new development. Mike offers tips for successful feature hand-off, intra-team communication, and troubleshooting hurdles that will be encountered. Although augmented regression testing is at odds with the advice of many agile “experts,” it enabled their agile development to achieve higher velocity.
Key Takeaways
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- Examples of an alternate engagement model that works with agile, remote, multi-vendor and complex ecosystems and ultimately leads to success.
- Suggestions for implementing an augmenting testing team successfully.
- Trouble shooting challenges that come up while introducing an augmenting team.
About Me!
Mike Hrycyk has been trapped in the world of quality since he first did user acceptance testing 19 years ago. He has survived all of the different levels and a wide spectrum of technologies and environments to become the quality dynamo that he is today. Mike believes in creating a culture of quality throughout software production and tries hard to create teams that hold this ideal and advocate it to the rest of their workmates. Mike is currently the Director of Quality for PQA Testing, but has previously worked in social media management, parking, manufacturing, web photo retail, music delivery kiosks and at a railroad. Intermittently, he blogs about quality at www.qaisdoes.com and tweets at @qaisdoes.