Is it recommended or discouraged to have a QC member split between 2 agile teams?

Justin Gamble's picture
Justin Gamble asked on February 19, 2013 - 8:14pm | Replies (2).

I'm interested to know of other projects where this situation has come up.  Would you recommend this?  Or should each team have only one QC tester?

2 Answers

Johanna Rothman's picture

I never recommend that anyone be split among any number of teams, period.

When you have an insufficient number of people, testers, DBAs, UX people, you have an impediment. The team needs to raise that impediment to someone who can resolve that impediment. In the meantime, the team needs to work around that impediment.

That means the team needs to do the testing itself. So the team without the tester has to do all the testing itself. And, the team with one lonely tester has to do lots of other testing, because a team with, say 3 or 4 developers and 1 tester, might have too many developers for that one tester.

Agile teams watch their work in progress and the quality of their output, their features. They can't say, "I did my part and handed it off to whomever." They say, "We worked together on this and got the whole darn thing to done."

It's a difficult problem, and one that arises often when teams start their transition to agile.

Lisa Anderson's picture

I'm the tester split between two teams and I'm going crazy trying to keep up. The velocity is down for both teams because, like Joanna said, the other team members have to jump in and do QA stuff while I'm with the other team. I don't recommend it. In the long run, it's less productive.

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