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

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: 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.

BONUS: Diana Getman – How checklists make Agile teams faster and deliver with high quality, without adding more processes

In this episode, we explore the role that checklists can have in helping teams improve their process and their performance without adding more processes.

It is a normal tendency to “add more processes” to fix a problem a team is experiencing. In this episode, we challenge that view. Checklists, we argue, are a simple, effective tool that helps you reach a similar goal, but does not require the process to grow, and become bloated.

2 Common types of checklists that help teams improve how they work

There are several types of items we can add to a checklist. In this segment, we discuss 2 common types of checklists, and how they can help teams. We start by discussing the “process checklists”, which may include important tips on how to execute a certain process.

The key thing to remember is that checklists don’t replace processes, but are rather a set of reminders, or items that help teams execute a process once they’ve already read and understood the process.

The second type of checklists we discuss are those that summarize a series of requirements or pre-conditions that a team needs to follow-up on. This may include quality requirements or certain tasks that need to be completed before a certain work item is considered complete.

The most common checklists Scrum teams use

Scrum teams have a common set of checklists that they use. We discuss the commonly used Definition of Done, and also talk about the importance of having a Definition of Ready, and how that may help teams get started on the right foot when a new Sprint is about to kick-off.

Additionally, we talk about a pre-release checklist. With a pre-release checklist, teams are able to keep a memory of what they’ve learned from the past about meeting the release requirements, and can continuously improve that critical aspect of any team’s process.

In this segment, we also tackle the usual objections that people given when asked to consider the use of checklists. Checklists may be seen as “more bureaucracy”, but instead, they are there to help teams summarize a process that already exists, provides transparency about the process execution, and ultimately it should be a time saver for the team.

How about you? How have you used Checklists in your work? Share your experience in the comments below.

About Diana Getman

Diana Getman has more than 25 years of experience as a project manager leading cross-functional teams, in both startup and non-profit organizations. Diana has held the roles of Scrum Master, Product Owner, and Agile Coach and is the current President at Ascendle, a custom software development firm in Portsmouth, NH.

You can link with Diana Getman on LinkedIn, or visit Ascendle’s blog for more on checklists.

How do we help Scrum teams focus on technical excellence? – Q&A with Jeff Campbell

Jeff is the author of Actionable Agile tools (available on Amazon, and direct from the author at bit.ly/aatbook). He joins us on this series of Q&A shows to answer questions you’ve submitted. You can submit your questions via our survey (short, about 2 min to fill-in) or by tweeting us @scrumpodcast with #agilejeff.

In this episode, we talk about the importance of technical excellence and how to help teams adopt that mindset.

How do we help teams focus on technical excellence?

Continue reading How do we help Scrum teams focus on technical excellence? – Q&A with Jeff Campbell

Matthew Heusser on Systems Thinking and how to apply it in your work

In this Episode we explore Systems Thinking with Matthew, and describe a 3 step process to apply Systems Thinking in our Scrum Master work:

Look at “touch time” the time that the work items are actually worked on. Matt shares with us an example of what this means in practice
Find out where are the queues and where the work “stops” and waits
Make the work visual, make it transparent

This process will help you to understand the system of work and diagnose the systemic problems that you will need to address.
We mention the Quality Software Management: Systems Thinking by Gerry Weinberg and Toyota Production System by Liker, both great primers to Systems Thinking applied in practice.

About Matthew Heusser

Matthew Heusser is the co-author of Save our Scrum, co-chair of the enterprise track at Agile2015, And he is also an author at CIO.com. Matt Software is a delivery consultant/writer and Collaborative software geek since before it was cool.
You can find Matthew Heusser on LinkedIn, and connect with Matthew Heusser on Twitter.