I go to some Software Quality Group of New England http://sqgne.org talks, and generally make a point of going when Johanna Rothman is the speaker. I used to work for JR, before she became a management consultant, and (1) it’s always great to see her again and (2) she’s a good speaker, her talks are always interesting and I learn something.
Stuff I learned: there’s a programming technique called “mobbing”, which is similar to pair programming, except more people are involved, and you need a large display so everyone can see. The resulting code still has to get code-reviewed, preferably by someone who wasn’t in the mob, but I can see that this ought to lead to code that all the participants understand very well, so they don’t have to go through the pain of trying to understand it at some later time. Also, “Cucumber” is a tool for doing Behavior Driven Development, and it needs to go on my list of things to do self-study on. (That list keeps growing …)
The talk itself: http://sqgne.org/presentations/2017-18/Rothman-Dec-2017.pdf , “Testers and QA as Agile Leaders”. The announcement email included this statement, “Acting as Agile leaders represents an important but possibly controversial change for QA/Testing folks, especially if you’ve been stifled by Agile projects.” Now, I’ve never worked Agile, though I’ve read about it for years, and I’d love to try it. From what I understand, “testers acting as Agile leaders” shouldn’t be controversial, or a change for that matter. If you’ve got a real self-organizing team that’s delivering working software frequently while dealing with changing requirements as an expected thing, and includes testing specialists who are effective, those testing specialists ought to be right in there contributing in the ways JR’s presentation describes. Maybe people aren’t accustomed to thinking of that as leadership?
And what’s that about some testers being “stifled” by Agile projects? I know that attempts to implement Agile have varying success rates, but I would think that would be a sign of “not a good implementation of Agile”. JR’s presentation does mention that expectations shape reality. That goes both for your expectations of yourself and for other people’s expectations of you, so maybe a tester in that situation needs to work on both? And that just triggered a memory of a presentation I was doing, many years ago, to some developers from a different part of that company, about what we, their new testers, might do for them. At some point one of the Devs said something like “testers aren’t technical enough to do that”, and my mouth dropped open and I said “um, most of us do have Computer Science degrees”*, and that Dev’s mouth then dropped open. It had not occurred to those Devs that testers could do stuff like code reviews, because they had never before had testers who could, and it had not occurred to us that we couldn’t.
*and I thought, but carefully did not say, “and mine’s from MIT, where’s yours from?”