Agile teams are usually cross functional and may be at different location, which means that they have people with different competencies like developers, testers and stake holders. Collaboration between the team members helps to make teams successful. Scrum masters can play major role to help testers and developers to work together in agile teams, and improve collaboration
Testers are an easy target when bugs are released into production and are often the focus of blame. Because of this, testing groups have built heavy processes and sign-offs to protect themselves from what they know will be coming later. Trust will need to be restored before testers will fully engage and freely interact with a team.
To make agile teams work, team members have to respect each other, and value each others opinions
If the relationship between developers and testers has a history of being toxic in your organization it will not go away on its own and the effects of the dysfunction will only be amplified on an Agile team. Quality must be a team event.
Several things that can be done to "build (or rebuild) a foundation for the testers and developers to form their relationship on":
- Learn about customers together.
- Build stories and acceptance testing together.
- Conduct Stand-ups properly
- Sprint wise retrospective should be done
- Create unit tests together.
- Emphasize conversations around quality and “done” over tools and process
- Create wining environment as well attitude of responsibility
Why it is important that developers and testers work together in agile teams
"People in Agile projects are moving away from “developers vs testers” (we vs they) culture and are collaborating in order to deliver the product at the end of sprint. Sprint success is major goal instead of developer or tester success."
I have suggestions which can be used to break down the walls between testers and developers:
Friendship and teamwork are the best keys to solve this issue. Being a good friend to a developer, means that you can talk to him and he will understand the issue and therefore you two combining your efforts, can improve the work. Both of you should understand that the better and the more coordinated your work the greater result you achieve. The developers, on their side, should guarantee that their work is free of bugs. However the testers, on their side, should ensure that if there are bugs, they should be dealt with in time and appropriately before it’s time to release the project.
Being a QA and having spent time with a team makes the relationship between every member, including you and developers, friendlier. While working together you can find faults beforehand. And it’s always better to fix them right away, rather than get complaints from clients. From cooperating, i.e. discussing design and solutions, everyone can benefit, for example developers can become aware of various issues and areas, so that they can improve the quality of their work, hence implanting the quality into their minds.
Testers always find bugs but they can also share some tactics with developers on how to test their work. It could help the developers to test their projects better, before handing them to clients. Note that such scheme can be true only when everyone is working together and share the same final target, i.e. “to deliver a high-quality product” and to satisfy the client.
Thoughts sharing:
Here are some thoughts concerning this issue:
- Sharing. Share your thoughts, strategies with developers. Don’t leave it till it’s become a screw.
- Be friendly and open-minded with developers so that they don’t feel wounded. Give them the opportunity to share anything with you.
- Keep your reporting style positive. Try to be more tactful
