Agile development depends on close involvement from customers or, at the very least, their proxies. Agile teams have invited customers to collaborate, work in the same locations if possible, and be intimately involved with the development process. Both sides learn each other’s strengths and weaknesses.
This change in the relationships needs to be recognized by both sides, and it doesn’t matter whether the customer is internal or external. An open relationship is critical to the success of an agile project, where the relationship between the customer team and the development team is more like a partnership than a vendor-supplier relationship.
Janet’s Story
In a large project I was on recently, the customer was actually a consortium of five companies, with one of them being the software company creating the software. Each of the companies supplied three of their best domain experts to represent their needs. There was regular communication between these on-site users and their own organizations, and they were also an integral part of the team they worked with on a daily basis.
A steering committee with representatives from all five companies was kept in the loop on progress and was brought in when decisions needed to be made at a higher level.
—Janet
Having a few representative domain experts, while keeping all stakeholders continually informed, is one approach to successful developer-customer collaboration. We’ll talk about others in Part V. Customers are critical to the success of your agile project. They prioritize what will be built and have the final say in the quality of the product. Testers work closely with customers to learn requirements and define acceptance tests that will prove that conditions of satisfaction are met. Testing activities are key to the development team-customer team relationship. That’s why testing expertise is so essential to agile teams.
Organization Size
The size of an organization can have great impact on how projects are run and how the structure of a company matures. The larger the organization, the more hierarchical the structure tends to be. As top-down communication channels are developed, the reporting structures become directive and less compatible with collaboration between technology and business.
Communication Challenges
Some agile processes provide ways to facilitate inter-team communication. For example, Scrum has the “Scrum of Scrums,” where representatives from multiple teams coordinate on a daily basis.
If you work in a large organization where the test teams or other specialized resources are separate from the programming teams, work to find ways to keep in constant touch. For example, if your database team is completely separate, you need to find a way to work closely with the database specialists in order to get what you need in a timely manner.
Another problem that tends to be more common in large companies is that customers might not be as accessible as they are in smaller companies. This is a big obstacle when you try to gather requirements and examples and seek to get customer involvement throughout the development cycle. One solution is to have testers or analysts with domain expertise act as customer proxies. Communication tools can help deal with such situations as well. Look for creative ways to overcome the problems inherent in big companies.
Chapter 16, “Hit the Ground Running,” describes how one large organization uses functional analysts to mitigate problems due to remote customers.
Conflicting Cultures within the Organization
With large software development shops, agile development is often first implemented in one team or just a few teams. If your agile team has to coordinate with other teams using other approaches such as phased or gated development, you have an extra set of challenges. If some of the external teams tend to be dysfunctional, it’s even harder. Even when an entire company adopts agile, some teams make the transition more successfully than others.
Your team might also run into resistance from specialist teams that are feeling protective of their particular silos. Lisa talked to a team whose members could not get any help from their company’s configuration management team, which was obviously a major obstacle. Some development teams are barred from talking directly to customers.
If third parties are working on the same system your team is working on, their cultures can also cause conflicts. Perhaps your team is the third party, and you’re developing software for a client. You will need to think about how to mitigate culture-based differences. Part V goes into more detail about working with other teams and third parties, but here are a few ideas to get you started.
Advanced Planning If you have to coordinate with other teams, you will need to spend time during release planning, or before the start of an iteration, to work with them. You need time to adapt your own processes to work with others’ processes, and they might need to change their processes to accommodate your requests. Consider arranging access to shared resources such as performance test specialists or load test environments, and plan your own work around others’ schedules. Your stakeholders might expect certain deliverables, such as formal test plans, that your own agile process doesn’t include. Some extra planning will help you to work through these cultural differences.
Chapter 15, “Tester Activities in Release or Theme Planning,” and Chapter 16, “Hit the Ground Running,” talk about what testers can do to help with planning and coordinating with other teams.
Act Now, Apologize Later We hesitate to make suggestions that might cause trouble, but often in a large organization, the bureaucratic wheels turn so slowly that your team might have to figure out and implement its own solutions. For example, the team that couldn’t get cooperation from the configuration management team simply implemented its own internal build process and kept working on getting it integrated with the officially sanctioned process.
If there aren’t official channels to get what you need, it’s time to get creative. Maybe testers have never talked directly to customers before. Try to arrange a meeting yourself, or find someone who can act as a customer proxy or go-between.
Empower Your Team
In an agile project, it is important for each development team to feel empowered to make decisions. If you’re a manager and you want your agile teams to succeed, set them free to act and react creatively. The culture of an organization must adapt to this change for an agile project to be successful.
Chapter 4, “Team Logistics,” talks more about separate functional teams and how they affect the agile tester.
Barriers to Successful Agile Adoption by Test/QA Teams
Any change faces barriers to success. Organizational culture, as we discussed in the previous section, might be the largest obstacle to overcome. Once organizational culture has become well established, it’s very hard to change. It took time for it to form, and once in place, employees become committed to the culture, which makes it extremely resistant to alteration.
This section discusses specific barriers to adoption of agile development methods that can be encountered by your testers and QA teams.
Loss of Identity
Testers cling to the concept of an independent QA team for many reasons, but the main reason is fear, specifically: