Tree Swing

My developers were good at what they did. We had our own automated tests. While the pipeline didn’t have as much tests as I’d now like, it did have enough. After the pipeline was implemented up to production, the next release had a major change. The developer working on it did her testing, it was all good. However when the code got to QA, that’s when I started noticing some problems with the usefulness of the pipeline.

I should mention that even though my dev team was informally practicing SCRUM, the project was basically waterfall and we were now in the QA phase. The QA team was not part of this SCRUM team. You’d have architecture, project management, sometimes product but never QA.

The tester in the QA team had a different interpretation of the requirements and so they started logging defects, a lot of them. Each time, the developer would make the changes, run her tests and it would be in QA in 15 minutes or less; then she’d wait. This would continue for weeks, It was like having a sports car that can do 0-100 in 2 seconds but is stuck in rush hour traffic. Every time we thought we were done we weren’t. Every time we moved forward, initially we did quickly but then just sat there and waited. I slowly realised that even though we made our part go faster, it didn’t mean we were on the same page as the QA team in their silo. If you’ve never seen it, the project management tree swing came to mind.