Julio de Lima Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Julio de Lima: How a QA engineer can help the PO get closer to the team

Being closer to the team, and the user are two important aspects of the PO work in a Scrum team. In this episode, we also about the QA engineer role in the relationship between the team and the PO.

The Great Product Owner: The User-centered PO

A great PO will help the team focus on the user, and understand what their needs are when they use the product. The PO helps the team understand, and focus on the interactions with the product, instead of the code or the technical details.

The Bad Product Owner: How a QA engineer can help the PO get closer to the team

When PO’s work mostly on their own, and share little with the team beyond the basic specifications for User Stories, a gap emerges in the relationship and later in the understanding of the product. But in these cases, the QA engineer can help the PO get closer to the team, and we explore how in this segment.

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About Julio de Lima

Julio is a Principal QA Engineer working for Capco that believes in the Culture of QA. He has been sharing professional insights and experiences on a daily basis and has more than 4500 students in his 4 online courses. In 2020, he was elected the Brazilian Testing reference practitioner.

You can link with Julio de Lima on LinkedIn and connect with Julio de Lima on Twitter.

Julio de Lima: Success for QA engineers and Scrum Masters

Julio is a Quality Assurance (QA) engineer, so we discuss what does it mean to be a successful QA engineer in a Scrum/Agile team. In this conversation, we talk about the need to help the whole team feel responsible for the quality of their deliverable. In other words, we talk about how to get the whole team to think like a QA engineer.

We also talk about the focus on this episode: success as a Scrum Master. In this regard, Julio shares how Scrum Masters can work with QA engineers specifically, to help them improve, and work better with the rest of the team. In this segment, we also discuss some of the pitfalls of estimation.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: People, Process and Technology

Julio’s preferred formats revolve around the triad of improvement: people, processes, and technology. He describes how he usually organizes retrospectives around these three topics, and how teams reacted when he deviated from these 3 topics.

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About Julio de Lima

You can link with Julio de Lima on LinkedIn and connect with Julio de Lima on Twitter.

Julio de Lima: The strikingly different role for QA leads in Agile organizations

As Julio’s career evolved, he started facing a waterfall anti-pattern: the status chaser. Julio’s superiors expected him to be intimately familiar with all the details of what was happening with every team, and every tester in his team. This led to an important personal change for Julio, a change that every QA lead needs to go through when working with Scrum/Agile teams.

About Julio de Lima

You can link with Julio de Lima on LinkedIn and connect with Julio de Lima on Twitter.

Julio de Lima: “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature” – solving conflicts between testers and developers in Scrum teams

Sometimes the perspective of the tester can be different from the team’s perspective when it comes to a bug or defect. When that difference of perspective exists, a conflict might arise. In this episode, we talk about how to bring the testers and developers to a common understanding on how to improve quality and avoid conflicts that escalate and can destroy a team.

Featured Book of the Week: Agile Testing by Janet Gregory, Lisa Crispin

In Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams by Janet Gregory and Lisa Crispin, Julio found what he calls “the bible for Agile testing practitioners”. The book helped Julio understand how different the tester perspective needs to be when working in an Agile team.

In this segment, we refer to the concept of exploratory testing, a critical concept for Agile testers.

About Julio de Lima

You can link with Julio de Lima on LinkedIn and connect with Julio de Lima on Twitter.

Julio de Lima: The QA perspective on the way Agile teams work

This week’s guest – Julio de Lima – is a quality and testing engineer that shares his views on Agile teams. The testing/quality perspective is critical for Scrum teams. In this episode, we talk about how test engineers can sometimes try to do everything themselves and prevent the team from taking ownership of the quality work. Julio shares his lessons learned and how he learned to help the whole team feel responsible for the quality of their work.

In this episode, we talk about Acceptance Test-Driven Development, a holistic quality approach that can involve the whole team.

About Julio de Lima

You can link with Julio de Lima on LinkedIn and connect with Julio de Lima on Twitter.