When I left dev team in 2018, they undid the work. Not intentionally, they just ignored it. Maybe it’s because all the contractors who worked with me on and myself left but I think it has to do with motivation. The dev lead and developers who took over also reported to my manager so why didn’t they maintain it? I think it’s because it wasn’t theirs, they didn’t own it. They also didn’t know how to use the version control system for their code so I assume that contributed to it. I’m told they went back to manual deploys for the system I described

When I left my QA team in 2022, they kept everything. The other testing team, a UAT team, was merged with mine and I’m told they questioned why my team worked the way they did. They questioned why stuff was automated the way it was or why so much detail was put into the Cucumber feature files. In the end, that team had to change to the way my team worked. I think this is because the way my team worked was theirs. It took me 4.5 years but every step was done by a fair selection of ideas from the testers who did the work. I could have just forced the adoption of Cucumber when I got there but then it would have been the same as the dev team.

The automated deployment that was implemented was achieved using extrinsic motivation. The testing teams were transformed using intrinsic motivation, they wanted to change. I mentionned that the COBOL developers ran the tests but towards the end of my time, they were told not to by their managers. I know that because they told me that they weren’t supposed to talk to me or run the tests even though their managers would deny it; they claimed to be fully supportive of the shift left initiative. Despite that, they still ran the tests. How do I know that and why did they? I know that despite that they actually ran it, because we’d log who ran a test suite, in which environment and what date. They had to pick between not running tests and dealing with the headache of defects and their managers breathing down their necks on one hand. On the other hand, they could run the tests quietly (their managers weren’t technical enough to know what’s going on) and if they were caught running QA tests they’d just get yelled at for an hour at most. So why did they do it? I never brought it up with them but I think it’s because we made the right thing the easy thing to do. The joy of getting fast feedback and enjoying coding was their intrinsic motivator.