Exploration Through Example

Example-driven development, Agile testing, context-driven testing, Agile programming, Ruby, and other things of interest to Brian Marick

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Sun, 05 Sep 2004

A series on traits

I've been worrying about testing in agile projects for about three years now. I started by wondering how people like me could fit into an agile project. Then, as I saw more and more programmers and, occasionally, product owners performing testing tasks, I came to focus more on the testing role: what are its goals? what are its components? what skills comprise it? how is the role distributed amongst the team?

Since the beginning of the year, I've been wondering less about what specifically has to be done and more about how a team evolves such that those things just naturally get done - or, if they don't get done, how the team recognizes that and corrects itself.

I've been thinking that a team has to have the right traits - in a way, the right personality. Individuals, I'm thinking, act as "carriers" of those traits. In the right circumstances, a person's traits will "infect" the team. Once that happens, you won't need to worry (so much) about which person should do what or which hats (roles) people should wear when.

In this blog category, I'll start giving capsule descriptions of the traits I think people like me should infect a team with. It's not that I think tester-people uniquely possess these traits; it's just that they're characteristic of testers, so testers make great carriers.

Background reading: Bret Pettichord's "Testers and Developers Think Differently".

## Posted at 08:54 in category /traits [permalink] [top]