Agile practices, emphasizing individual interaction, customer collaboration, working software and adaptability have transformed software delivery. Ironically, many QA organizations have dodged the agile bullet and remain unchanged. Developers still rely on QA to test for them after development is done. They still wait to throw it over the wall to QA after they've finished some discrete functionality and the tradition of keeping QA out of the team rooms lives on.
In another twist of irony, QA is complicite in the conspiracy. We resist the imperitive to learn how to automate. We continue to congregate together instead of dispersing into the team rooms and we have not learned how to effectively say "No" when the organization slips on dates and tries to compress the time available to conduct testing.
Defects are still getting through and the impact affects not only QA, but the Dev teams and many other parts of our organizations. We are giving the naysayers ammunition to say "we tried it, but agile isn't working". The "evidence of it working just isn't there" they say, and QA, done this way, is helping them make their case. As Pogo once said, "We have met the enemy and he is us".
This session will explore how QA needs to learn new skiils and adopt new practices to become an integral part of the Solution Delivery Team(s). We will look at Quality Metrics, Test Automation and the Testing Pyramid and explore some of the new skills QA team members need to learn in order to become a more integral part of the tight feedback loops necessary in an agile world.