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Details

Forming a Scrum team should include all the skills necessary to develop a user story in order to deliver a potentially deliverable product increment with each sprint.

In traditional organizations, however, I always encounter a fundamental mistrust of the integration of testers in the Scrum teams. Instead, a separate test team is to remain, which is then responsible for regression tests, load and performance tests and the test automation. The rationale for this type of organization is the so-called independence of the testers.

I have several problems with this view of things. Scrum makes the team fully responsible for the results. The establishment of an "independent" test team assumes that the Scrum team does not live up to its responsibilities and would turn a blind eye to errors in the product increment.

Another danger associated with the independent test team is that the testers become test report reporters who are not involved in the elimination of the problem.

In the scrum sense, we prefer problem solvers. The tester in the Scrum team, as well as all developers responsible for the delivery of a flawless product increment and will make every effort to fix it or have it fixed when uncovering an error. Another advantage of the tester in the team is the simple possibility to develop automated tests in step with the implementation of the user stories.

The Problem:

the procedure described already shows a part of the problem: the lead time for a new Product Backlog Item increases to several Sprints: 1 Sprint implementation plus 1 Sprint deferred test (plus possibly another Sprint error correction, if unfortunately this is no longer possible, without the commitment to break the current sprint, and considered less important). This results in further problems: does one need 2 Definition of Done? When does the PO take the item? Does he take it off twice? How much buffer does the deployment team need to keep in fix to fix the returned bugs? Not to mention the context switch that becomes necessary. Pull testers and developers together and try to avoid mistakes instead of finding (with 1 sprint offset)? etc etc

How to change this problem?

Get a good Scrum Master who can convince the organization that Scrum teams should not be depended on other teams to deliver shippable software. It is an impediment he/she should resolve.

Traditional Organisations want the benefits of Scrum without changing their ways. Even for great coaches, this could be a process of years. Don't give up. Be bluntly honest about these ScrumBut Mini Waterfalls (eg testing after the Sprint) to management. Good Scrum leadership should work on fixing it. I think your thinking is spot on, but trust has still to be earned. See if you can find one team who dares to help prove that your thinking works. Maybe ask dev and test team for 2-3 Sprints to Experiment with your ideas.

The rationale for this type of organization is the so-called
independence of the testers.

The counter-argument is that having an independent test team is that development teams can take shortcuts to make their Sprints because the testers will find their mistakes. Leading to dev-test ping-pong and lower quality because the test team is also under pressure to release and will skip low risks tests over high-risk area's. Leading to a slower release cycle and overall lower quality.

Scrum Testers should create a quality culture in the Scrum team, coaching team members to understand how to produce a well-tested increment at the end of the Sprint.

Load and performance testing could be a separate Product Backlog Item to improve performance. Although automating this type of testing in build pipelines is becoming more and more common.

I've tested in the sprint + 1 system under the SAFe framework. The framework does not specific this but lends itself to doing it for organizations coming from waterfall.

Mu suggestion is:

stop it

Your questions of

Does one need 2 Definition of Done? When does the PO take the item? Does he take it off twice? How much buffer does the deployment team need to keep in fix to fix the returned bugs? Not to mention the context switch that becomes necessary. Pull testers and developers together and try to avoid mistakes instead of finding (with 1 sprint offset)? etc etc

plus ones that I would add such as:

How to keep the code bases branched correctly? How to keep code in sync with environments? How to manage deployment through multiple environments and tests and processes? How to record the bugs?

When I find I am writing the words above I pause and go back to:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools


• Working software over comprehensive documentation


• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation


• Responding to change over following a plan

particularly

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Testing is sprint+1 is introducing a whole lot of process instead of individuals doing the work now and talking to each other. This sort of set up will inevitably lead to "The test team as an enemy of development" and that is what you have found. Exactly that

You need to keep stressing the importance of changing this. It is an investment. It will slow development down this week... and speed it up in X months. Leadership for the long term view is needed and can come come from any self-empowered person in the organization.

If you cannot change the setup I recommend the following actions:

• Write failing tests first (BDD)


• Pay equitably for automation engineers


• Communicate the benefit of testing to developers


• Work on relationships between application and automation engineers


• Embed automation engineers within the application development teams


• Truly empower automation engineers to 'pull the cord' and say no, don't deploy


• Talk openly about second class citizen syndrome for testers and how to avoid it


• Ensure social events - lunches, parties, lunch and learns, etc. include both parties


• Refer to folks as application and automation engineers instead of 'devs and testers'

Trust your feelings, Luke.
Seriously, the scenario you described is an anti-pattern. They simply are not ready to let go of waterfall. They are probably concerned about the panic among test leads and managers and testers themselves when they realize that their services as they currently exist are no longer needed.
But this is really a binary thing. You either test continuously (all dev team members) and be agile or you hand it off and remain waterfall. Which do they want?