QA and Devs Working Together

In our latest experience report, Tearing Down the Walls, Stephanie Savoia asks us to,

“Imagine a wall. Now imagine a developer creating code and throwing it over…[where] it lands on the heads of the Quality Assurance (QA) or Test team. This is where the code is tested in various ways. If the development team does unit testing, then many of the tests QA are creating/executing are duplicative. If there are no unit tests, QA are left to test as much of the affected code as they can.”

Now imagine a more efficient world where QA and Devs work together much more closely. That’s where Stephanie is today. This report recounts her journey from being a member of a separate QA group, to being a valued member of a unified XP team that includes both Developers and QA. Pairing on her team is not only Dev/Dev but also QA/Dev. It happens daily. And the whole team takes responsibility for code quality.

Stephanie Savoia has been working in quality assurance for 12 years. Currently, she is a Technical Lead in QA at Marchex, Inc. Prior to that she worked at LexisNexis. Before that, she created the quality control process for deliverables at Applied Discovery, a legal software company, and verified the data that would be sent to opposing counsel and government entities such as the Securities & Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice.

The Agile Manifesto says,

“We are uncovering better ways of developing
software by doing it and helping others do it.”

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