Dwayne Thomas & Kevin Swallow, CrowdCompass
As CrowdCompass has matured its agile processes, pressure has increased on the company’s testing team to become more efficient at delivering high quality products. Testers actively sought coding knowledge to contribute more to software development discussions. Testers also sought to automate more of the testing workflow. The need for the code discussions arose because very few of the testers were experts with programming. Moreover, most of us had less than 2 years of experience at CrowdCompass and did not know how else to speed our adoption of coding best practices.
Code Clubs are recurring coding discussions that often feel like a brewing stew of ideas. They give us the nutrients to strengthen our strategic effort of leveraging code in our testing efforts. CrowdCompass leadership wholly encourages the clubs, because learning and initiative are company values –and that is reflected in our quality engineering (QE) practices. We believe the organization has benefited from these low investment meetings. No direct causal link can be established between product improvements and the clubs, but, since the CrowdCompass Code Clubs started, many of the test staff have started new scripting projects and even some of our most code-anxious testers have contributed to the automation effort.
This paper shares the experiences of our testing team with these code discussions. We will provide the information necessary for the reader to start their own Code Club and some of the programming lessons we learned.
Target Audience: Introductory
2015 Technical Paper, Dwayne Thomas & Kevin Swallow, Paper, Slides, Notes, Video.
