Philip Daye, Ultimate Software
Organizations adopt Agile methods hoping to reap the benefits of shortened feedback loops and a quicker release cadence. This often leads to teams that focus on their individual product areas and that can easily become siloed. These teams may seek solutions for similar challenges, unaware of what others have already done. Fragmented solutions make collaboration difficult and put the health of the product at risk. This becomes increasingly troublesome as the organization grows and tries to scale development.
In a culture of silos, how does an organization provide guidance and standards to its teams? Many organizations attempt to solve this problem by creating a centralized team focused on quality processes, but it often becomes one more siloed team. Instead, as quality gets decentralized, and quality and test engineers get federated out to teams, community leadership becomes increasingly important.
Join Philip as he walks you through Ultimate Software’s journey transforming individual siloed test engineers into a cross-team guild with shared interests, challenges, and goals. The guild may collaborate to build new tools or propose improvements to testing practices, sharing findings with the rest of the organization for further feedback and iteration. By breaking down the barriers, the result is a quality guild that enables a culture around quality, with a goal to provide leadership to testers across the organization.
Key takeaways include:
- A hidden cost to Agile
- Siloed teams tend to have fragmented processes
- Decentralizing quality leads to a greater need for community leadership
- Build a culture of collaboration.
Philip Daye, 2019 Technical Presentation, Paper
