Augmenting the Agile Team – A Testing Success Story

Today, three things are undeniable facts of 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 handoff, 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

• 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.