In this workshop, we’ll examine the various ways that agile principals and practices build quality into our process, and how these work best when programmers & testers work together. We’ll facilitate games and discussions on how traditionally cast “developers” and “testers” can use these techniques to best draw on their own unique strengths to ensure a quality product.

The workshop will be broken into 3 successive parts, moving from more traditional thinking (“developer testing vs tester testing”) into agile concepts (like “all together” and “stop the line”):

1. Mock development activity that simulates a traditional, sequential development approach to allow participants to experience the dysfunctions we tend to build into our processes in a context outside of software development. Have participants identify the dysfunctions they experienced and discuss whether we also see these same problems on software projects in the real world.

2. Using Lean Thinking as our compass, we’ll examine why many of the problems we encounter in software actually stem from the way our projects are organized, rather than being issues that are somehow inherent to the process of developing software.

3. Explore the various ways that agile principals and practices help us build quality into our process and show how, by having testers and programmers work together, we can overcome these dysfunctions to build software that delights our customers. We’ll demonstrate how there are many ways beyond traditional testing that agile uses to produce high quality, successful products that build upon the diverse skills and perspectives that each of us brings to the table. Finally, we’ll do one more mock development activity, this one simulating how we can break dysfunctions by working together.

We’ll conclude the workshop with a retrospective to learn from one another how we can make this work on our own projects, and ways we can improve.