Integrating Testers into Scrum Teams: Best Practices and Solutions

Integrating Testers into Scrum Teams: Best Practices and Solutions

3 July 2024 Stephan Petzl Leave a comment QA

Forming a Scrum team should encompass all the necessary skills to develop a user story, delivering a potentially shippable product increment with each sprint. However, traditional organizations often resist integrating testers into Scrum teams, favoring separate test teams for regression tests, load and performance tests, and test automation. This organizational structure aims to maintain the independence of testers but introduces several challenges.

Challenges with Independent Test Teams

Maintaining separate test teams can lead to several issues:

  • Increased lead time for new Product Backlog Items, potentially spanning multiple sprints.
  • Need for multiple Definitions of Done (DoD) and ambiguity on when the Product Owner (PO) should accept items.
  • Buffer requirements for deployment teams to fix returned bugs and context switching between teams.

Proposed Solutions

To address these challenges, consider the following recommendations:

Stop Sprint+1 Testing

Testing in a subsequent sprint introduces unnecessary processes instead of fostering immediate collaboration. Emphasize the Agile principle of “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools” to promote real-time communication and cooperation within the team.

Empower Automation Engineers

Automation engineers should be integrated within application development teams. They should be empowered to halt deployments if necessary and ensure that testing is a continuous part of the development process.

Promote a Quality Culture

Scrum testers should coach team members to produce well-tested increments by the end of each sprint. This approach minimizes the need for separate test teams and fosters a collaborative environment where quality is a shared responsibility.

Implement Behavior-Driven Development (BDD)

Writing failing tests first can help align development and testing efforts, ensuring that tests are created in parallel with code development. This practice also facilitates better communication between developers and testers.

Additional Recommendations

  • Ensure equitable compensation for automation engineers to attract and retain top talent.
  • Organize social events to foster relationships between application and automation engineers.
  • Refer to team members as application and automation engineers instead of “devs and testers” to promote equality and collaboration.

Practical Example: Integrating Load and Performance Testing

Load and performance testing can be managed as separate Product Backlog Items to improve performance. Automating these tests in build pipelines is becoming increasingly common. This practice ensures that performance issues are identified and addressed early in the development cycle.

Conclusion

Integrating testers into Scrum teams is essential for delivering high-quality software. By fostering a collaborative environment and promoting continuous testing, teams can avoid the pitfalls of separate test teams and ensure that quality is a shared responsibility.

How Repeato Can Help

For organizations looking to streamline their testing processes, Repeato offers a no-code test automation tool for iOS and Android. Repeato leverages computer vision and AI to create, run, and maintain automated tests quickly. Its ease of setup and use makes it an excellent choice for integrating automated testing into your Scrum team, helping to ensure that testing is an integral part of the development process.

For more information on how Repeato can enhance your testing strategy, visit our documentation or contact us for a demo.

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