Successful agile teams live and work by the principle of “whole team quality”. This doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone is responsible for everything in terms of quality, but it does mean that everyone is responsible for the overall quality. It makes sense to enable and empower teams to undertake quality tasks as a team – and not just leave them to selected people.
In this talk, I’ll present the techniques we use to evolve our tester and developer roles to bring them closer together when it comes to quality – without suggesting that the roles should necessarily merge. I’ll talk about:
• Training testers and developers in exploratory testing techniques
• Focusing the team on ‘getting things done’ (where done is also tested!)
• Refining the tester role into more technical and more functional aspects
• Business-facing test automation and how teams can successfully distribute the work involved
— Including the concepts of “technical quality advocates” and “Java for Testers”
• Automation Patterns for business-facing test automation
• Seamless integration of test automation into the daily life of the team
• Moving from Continuous Integration to Continuous (Internal) Deployment to more frequent external releases
I’ll start with an explanation of our history and status quo as an example of techniques and practices that need to be in place, then introduce the drivers for making changes before presenting the individual practices and their effects.
About the title: the “potential” and “slayer” reference comes from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where [SPOILER ALERT] the final battle is won by not having just one vampire slayer, as was previously the case. Instead, they create a super army of slayers by empowering anyone with the slayer potential to actually become a slayer. I think this is a nice analogy, and I’ll almost certainly show a video!
