Time: 1 hour: 15-minute meeting per team member and 15-minute reflection.
Purpose: In this activity, you will meet with team members to help further your understanding of agile as well as practise skills around gathering information about your team’s current context. Discovering what other people’s perspectives of agile are and their approach is essential to help you determine how testing fits into the process.
Introduction: You have started to establish your own definition of agile, but everyone in your team has their own understanding of what agile is and how it works. For you to be able to identify areas in which testing can support your team, you need to find out your team’s thoughts on agile and what their current approach to agile delivery is.
The skills gained in this activity will be useful to you throughout your career as a software tester as understanding a team’s context and ideals can inform not just how you test but how to promote a quality mindset.
Task: To get different perspectives of the agile flow, Identify a developer, a business analyst/product owner and scrum master (or similar) in your team and invite them to have a cup of tea for a one-to-one chat about agile and the current software process at your place of work.
Ask each key member:
- What does agile mean to them? How do they define it and describe it to others?
- What agile processes have the team adopted and what value do they feel the team is getting from them?
Take notes on their answers and reflect on how this will affect your understanding of agile and how it impacts a team’s approach to agile. Think about:
- What are the similarities and differences between different team members’ views? Why do you think this is?
- How will their views affect the project?
- How will their views affect how you work and communicate with them?
- How can this team member support you and your testing?
Make sure you take lots of notes as the information you identify will be used in activity 2.2