“The executive who decides whether or not you will be allowed to release your product, will not be looking at your product code to make that decision. They will be looking at your defect numbers and your test pass rates.”
This is how I started a conference call last week, as part of a session to encourage more focus on test.
In a truly Agile team there are no dedicated testers or developers. Everyone is a software engineer and everyone shares responsibility for the quality of what is produced.
In an ideal world everyone would harbour a deep desire to ensure testing has been done fully, before even considering the possibility of coding more features. Sadly, in reality it is all too tempting to charge ahead with the next feature on the list. Because it is so hard to know when you are ‘done’ testing and so easy to see the features you’ve not started yet.

So I find myself trying to raise the profile of the business of testing, why we do it, and how our process ties into it. Software engineers find it easy to understand all the features that need to be written to meet the requirements. What is needed is a gentle reminder that the gateway to release is controlled by someone who will not try the product, they will not read the code, or even the documentation. The measures that they use to determine fitness for release are defect trends and test passes. They look to see that the rate of high severity defects being raised has dropped off, and that the tests are, if not 100% passing, then very close to it.

In a traditional team, one or two key people needed to worry about that and direct their fixed teams accordingly.  Part of being an Agile team is making sure that everyone understands these metrics and takes their share of responsibility to prioritise test in their planning.

Shortly after my conference call, one of the local component leads told me that another team had let him know they would not be developing the feature he wanted until the next sprint, because their plan was full with testing in the current sprint.  What’s more, he understood and accepted that this took priority over his request. So, for the moment at least, the message is getting through.