I was recently reading Shapeup, the book is about how Basecamp does software product development. With specific examples from their practices the author provokes very interesting thoughts.
While my current team doesn’t operate in the same fashion as Basecamp, I presented some of the ideas in this book for the sake of argument to my team. One question I raised to my product manager: How abstract or concrete do we keep the requirements for our engineers?
I am a lead QA engineer across 3 lean dev teams, running with goals to seed quality engineering practices earlier in the dev cycle. The book has some valuable tips I have tried to inculcate in my work:
- Steps for shaping chapter helps me answer the eternal questions I face as a tester: ‘What to test?’ and ‘How much to test?’
- I took cues from the Write the pitch chapter for preparing and pitching my QA strategy to our team
The book doesn’t specifically cover testing as a topic, so I tweeted to basecamp to know how testing/quality fits in the shapeup model.
Ryan Singer responded:
Testing happens within the team, within the cycle. Programmers write their own tests. We bring QA into the team toward the end of the cycle and they discover edge cases, compatibility issues etc.
Overall this book is a great read and provokes me as a quality engineer to engage and influence in various product development phases.
UPDATED: A new section was added about bugs.