The word “team” isn’t always the most accurate way to describe a software organization. When you’re not adhering to agile, it’s common for the development and testing branches to work separately, making it difficult to intelligently collaborate for the sake of more secure, better functioning applications.
There are two separate silos working toward the same cause but often finding themselves at odds with each other in terms of how things should be done.
Agile, by its very nature, is about collaboration. The developers work alongside the testers, the testers see eye-to-eye (at least in most cases) with the developers, and there’s just a more flexible nature to the team itself. Additionally, some of the duties previously considered exclusive to specific members of a software team can now spill over to other departments, increasing the sense of teamwork.
Many of the gaps that previously existed between developers and testers have now been bridged because of agile. Instead of having two separate groups of people pushing and pulling the team in different directions, there’s more open communication. More importantly, success depends on this one team working collaboratively together—it’s not about either side “winning”.
This more modern style of business has eliminated the sense that the testers and developers are in a battle against each other, and according to LogiGear CTO Hans Buwalda, that just means more can get done.
“That means you can do stuff. A very simple example: testability. And testability is the notion of how friendly is a system and a test for testing. And particularly automated testing,” Buwalda explained in an interview with StickyMinds. “And that becomes a lot easier because you're on the same team as the developer. So if you need like a hook for timing or an interface definition or anything like that, you just go to your local developer, your team member, and you talk about it.”
You don’t need to send a carrier pigeon carrying a detailed bug report to the development team and hope that something gets done. Because of how close agile forces your team to become, efficiency reaches a level that more standard software teams rarely see.
Of course, no agile team is perfect, but if you find your development and testing teams are often butting heads, you should consider adopting agile methods to encourage teamwork and reduce the amount of infighting that occurs within many software projects.
