Re: QA Lead and Agile

Responding to Englehart...

Anyway, I asked the tester who supposedly works for me that I'd like
to start getting brief weekly status reports. I asked that he tell me
his accomplishments for the week, goals for the next week, any issues
or blockers, and anything else on his mind. He told me that in agile,
doing weekly status reports is a waste of time. Huh? I want to use
them to not only oversee what he is doing but also as one source of
input to evaluate his performance. Am I asking for too much? How
would you suggest I handle this issue?

In an agile environment it probably is a waste of time. The use of IID in agile processes is designed to narrow the scope of concerns within a given iteration to a level that should be manageable in an informal and verbal manner. So you don't want to generate formal reports unless there is a demonstrable need for them (i.e., you can demonstrate with hard experimental data that things went better with them than without them).

Presumably you both are involved in the initial team planning meetings where the iteration stories and their requirements are defined for the current iteration. If they are all going to get done in 3 weeks, there can't be a lot of them so there isn't a lot to manage.

For example, you can post a checklist of the stories in your area and you both can check them off as tests for them are completed. If there seems to be a problem for the schedule, you can talk to your peon 1-on-1. If there are blockers or other issues you just need to ensure that your peon will come to you when they arise.

I would avoid using status meetings as a performance evaluation tool. What you care about is whether your peon gets the work done on time, provides quality work, communicates well, and gets along well with other team members. Status meetings don't tell you that. Good managers evaluate performance indirectly by observing their minions in action on the job. That's especially true when there is only one chief and one indian. After a couple of weeks of working together it would be hard *not* to have a good idea of the peon's performance.

As test lead I would be far more concerned with ensuring you have the correct and current requirements in hand for writing acceptance tests. IMO a big problem with agile processes is parallel communication. The source of requirements is customer and the delivery of those requirements is informal, usually verbal. The customer needs to tell the developers, the QA group, Documentation, and Customer Support exactly the same thing and they all need to interpret it the same way. That is nontrivial in a verbal communication environment.

But it is an even bigger problem when things need to change during the iteration. Quite often the developers talk directly to the customer about a change so that QA and Doc are left out of the loop. That leads to nasty surprises at the end of the iteration when the developers built something different than QA and Doc expected.

Bottom line: managing your peon is going to be the least of your problems as QA lead.


--
There is nothing wrong with me that could
not be cured by a capful of Drano.

H. S. Lahman
hsl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Pathfinder Solutions
http://www.pathfindermda.com
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"Model-Based Translation: The Next Step in Agile Development". Email
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