This document summarizes challenges faced by a development team and how they implemented a squad approach to solve them. It introduces the presenter and provides an overview of the large project involving many developers and testers. It describes challenges for developers, testers, and leads due to separate teams and lack of coordination. The squad approach embedded testers within developer teams to work collaboratively using pair programming. This solved issues around communication, requirements, and feature readiness determination by having integrated delivery teams.

1. QA & You

2. Agenda
• Introduction
• What are some of the challenges we are
facing
• How did we solve these challenges
• Q & A / Feedback

3. Introduction
• My Name: Jon Robinson (@jumpmancol)
• What I Do: QA Lead for Scripps WCM
Platform
• My Background: Started as a consultant,
and have worked for both Fortune 500
companies as well as small startups.
Wide range of industry experience;
Banking, Financial Services, Insurance,
Retail, Media

4. Project Overview
• Project has roughly ~60 people involved on a daily
basis
• ~40 are directly related to development or QA
• ~20 are Project/Program level
• Mass CHAOS!!!!!!!

5. Developer Challenges
• Very, very aggressive pace
• QA team is a separate unit
• Developers often work in isolation
• Need precise steps to recreate issues that QA finds

6. QA Challenges
• Developers do not typically develop with QA in mind
• Dev teams have a tendency to say “Well it works on
my system”
• A lot of valuable testing time is taken up in writing up
the steps the dev teams need to recreate

7. Leads Challenges
• The back and forth nature of issues bouncing
between teams is a giant time suck
• A whole lot of “Hurry up and wait” happening
• Accurately determining the readiness of a feature
can be difficult

8. The Squad Approach
• A team of 2-3 people
• Typically 2 developers, and 1 QA
• Work in a pair programming approach
• No longer separate Dev & QA designations, but
rather a single Delivery team
• Much more SCRUM-like
• Each Squad is part of a Team
• Teams have a daily standup

9. Test Management
• Issues are tracked in JIRA
• Classified as Features, Change Requests, Bugs, &
Tasks
• Acceptance Criteria/Test Cases written against
Features & Change Requests
• AC must be reviewed and signed off on by Product
owners
• Written before development begins

10. Issue Management
• Daily review of all issues that are blocked
• Daily review of all issues that are missing AC
• Weekly reports run showing Story Point & Issue
Count increase/decrease
• Weekly reports showing burndown

11. Success Criteria
• Developer Challenges
• QA is now embedded within the Delivery team
• AC has been written ahead of time, and the entire Delivery team
works off of the same set
• QA Challenges
• Dev team has to keep QA in mind as they are now part of the Delivery
team
• Everyone works in a shared environment
• No time is wasted trying to re-document steps to reproduce an issue
• Leads Challenges
• No more back and forth between teams
• Features flow through at consistent rate
• Feature is deemed ready once the entire Delivery team has signed off

12. Q & A / Feedback

13. In Closing
• Jon Robinson (@jumpmancol)
• http://about.me/jumpmancol
Yes, I am a HUGE Cubs fan