It’s not uncommon for testing professionals to feel like the final line of defence against production defects and whether or not it is warrantied many of those same test professionals feel under scrutiny from the delivery team / stakeholders and users to ‘get something delivered’. 

Individually these principles of ‘defence’ and ‘delivery’ can conflict and this is where testing can feel like an outlier in the delivery process.  The Project sponsor, Product owners and Delivery Managers all know quality is paramount to future success and reputation enhancement and it doesn’t take long to come up with several high profile examples of huge international organisations getting the balance wrong and end up suffering, defects, outages, reputational damage, customer vulnerabilities and financial impact, however, that pressure to meet a date, a deadline or a marketing campaign can all be too much and risks are taken.     

By introducing testing as early as possible in to the development and delivery process you can remove a large proportion of risk.  Traditionally the testing is prepared, scripted, data setup, environment set up and a code deployment takes place in to a ‘test’ environment, while the approach is solid the speed and adaptability is not.   For example, if the test team find a high severity defect in this environment with any recognised test approach the process to resolution is slow and cumbersome; raise a defect, triage defect, prioritise defect, assign a developer, fix defect, test in development, deploy to ‘test’, assign a tester and then re-test to validate the fix.  This is the reason that the ‘defence’ approach is adopted.    

At CQE we understand how to expedite and create efficiencies in this process, by integrating testers in to the development process, working hand in hand with the business, developers and the delivery team we know how to find defects early.  The aim is to establish a one team way of thinking, removing barriers and having everyone understand the importance of embedded collaboration.  This process removes the cumbersome approach listed above and allows the team to focus on Agile delivery, achievements and success rather than being the final gatekeeper.   

This new approach changes the approach, now finding a defect in the sprint phase of delivery allows the team to communicate and work together to resolve the problem during the development process, this reduces the amount of bugs being raised, the time to resolution, increases stability of the test environment, creates an early feedback loop with more accurate timescales and velocity reporting, thereby allowing the Project Sponsor and stakeholders more confidence in the future of the business.