Transitioning to a more agile testing
So when I started at my current company I started in support calling and talking to clients and fixing various issues. I worked my way up to taking tougher clients then eventually moved over to become a Quality Assurance Analyst. When I first started we were 5 testers who tested the whole software as a whole. No one was a specialist in one area and no one had any say in any part of the software. We were even left out of important meetings and basically were the bottom of the barrel but we put in our bugs where ever we found them. Shortly after I started there was a plan to move more towards what Spotify does and have a bunch of groups that were made of programers, testers, and something called a Product Owner. Since at the time we were short on QA a lot of us were in multiple squads. As we kept with this new set up more QA was needed and we now number a dozen.
Now with the change QA has a voice in their part of the software. We specialize in testing only certain parts of the software and work closely with the developers and product owner to put out a better product. This has changed for the better as now QA has a voice in each squad and everyone is a equal in the squad. We get a say in fixes and designs. This has been a definite improvement to how things were before. However some old habits are still creeping up when admins take over our squad for random new projects and sometimes QA is left out again. This is happening less but over the years I hope it will fade. We are now getting more control with the product owners getting more responsibilities. So far agile is working really well for us but like most companies we have yet to embrace the full agileness.
Coming Soon…
Currently I am working on a podcast site with a fellow tester of mine called Test Reactor. This is going to be a podcast by geeks for geeks. There will be a segment every podcast about Software testing as well. This is to show the world that Geeks work too. I hope it can be under way soon and will update you when we get our first podcast going.
