United we stand: quality improvements led by a dev-test-pair

What potential for change can two newbies (one developer and one tester) bring to a long-standing team if they notice that there are gaps in the quality and a bad division of labour between testers and developers?

Faced with this situation, we had the choice of adapting to existing patterns or trying to break the traditional concept and introduce the team to new innovative ways of working. We took on the challenge of the second option!

Our hope was to unite the team as one by achieving the following goals

-improve the quality of the product

-raise awareness for quality amongst all members

In this talk, we’ll look at the initial situation of the team to give you some context, and we’ll present how we went about encouraging them to change their patterns. We’ll look at the methods we used to increase quality and quality awareness such as:

-regular exploratory mob-testing sessions

-automated test-programming sessions

-creating a code review Cheat Sheet

We’ll also go into the soft factors such as team events, improved communication practices and team building.

From our story, participants will see what worked well and what didn’t, and how combining the forces of a developer and a tester made it easier for our ideas to take hold. We’ll evaluate the methods and ideas we introduced and which goals we were able to achieve or not.