quality

How may I be of service?

Sam Falco2 Comments

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I have always had an impulse to help people. As a child, I would always volunteer to help, whether it was around the house, or at school helping the teacher, or at school helping my classmates when they struggled with their studies. It didn’t even matter whether or not I liked the person who needed help.

I’d sometimes volunteer even at the expense of getting my own chores or tasks done. I remember helping a boy in my neighborhood finish up yard chores so he wouldn’t get in trouble with his father. Later, I was grounded for not mowing my own yard. Because of course he didn’t come over and help me with my chores.

I learned never to do anything for him again, but I still overextended myself time and again with others. I was the guy who would volunteer to help run your thing, get your stuff, or collaborate on your project. Often, I volunteered to do things that, on second thought, I really didn’t want to do at all. One example was my service on the board of the local chapter of the American Society for Quality.

Early in my Quality Assurance career, my boss encouraged me to get involved in a professional organization that would help my career, and I attended an ASQ meeting to check it out. During the meeting, they mentioned that they needed someone to serve as Historian for the chapter. After the meeting, I volunteered.

I was not even a member yet.

I joined the next day, and served as Historian for the chapter for about a year. After a few months, it became clear that I’d made a mistake. The organization, both local and national, was heavily geared toward quality in manufacturing. Software was an afterthought. I didn’t gain much in the way of professional development, and as a board member, I felt obligated to attend every meeting whether I wanted to or not.

Fortunately, I had the sense to decline the offer to step into the Secretary position when it became available. I resigned from the board, and stopped going to meetings that I wasn’t getting any value out of.

My impulse to help was one of the reasons I was so strongly drawn to the Scrum Master role when my company adopted Scrum. Being a “servant leader” is all about helping and empowering others.

Being a Scrum Master ultimately made me realize the folly of being too generous with my support. I recognized that the “leader” portion of servant-leader meant helping people to learn to solve their own problems.

 

Image by Fran Priestly.

 

Tampa Bay ScrumMasters Guild February 2016

Sam Falco

At the February Tampa Bay ScrumMasters Guild, David Corbin, President and Chief Architect of Dynamic Concepts Development Corporation, presented “A Comprehensive Approach to Testing.”

David started by introducing his Axioms of Testing:

  • In a perfect world, testing is a complete waste of time—but we do not exist in a perfect world, so testing is crucial.
  • 100% testing of any non-trivial system would require an infinite amount of resources. You can’t prove a system is defect free.

These foundations served as a launching point to discuss a variety of factors that go into creating a comprehensive testing infrastructure. Topics included:

  • Forces that drive testing
  • What do we test
  • When do we test
  • Guiding principles of testing

David will present “A Comprehensive Approach to Testing” at the South Florida Code Camp on February 20th.

The next Tampa Bay ScrumMasters Guild meeting is March 2.

Scrum and Quality

Sam Falco

As a Scrum Master at my last job, I often interviewed developer candidates to judge their experience with and appreciation for Scrum. Almost all had some experience with it, and opinions were mixed. Many were non-committal. Others rhapsodized about it. And one told me she hated Scrum, because “It’s a waste of time.”

Of all the complaints I’d heard about Scrum, this was a first. Scrum a waste of time? I asked her to elaborate.

“You have a two week Sprint, and deliver the code, and then you wait around doing nothing for two weeks while QA tests it and tells you whether it was accepted or not.”

I assured her that what she described was not good Scrum practice. The Scrum Guide states that, “A new Sprint starts immediately after the conclusion of the previous Sprint.” She didn’t see how that was possible. How, she wanted to know, could code be considered complete before QA had blessed it? How does Quality Assurance fit into the Scrum development cycle?

“Scrum recognizes no titles for Development Team members other than Developer,” states the Scrum Guide, and Scrum also does not recognize sub-teams. The team should be cross-functional, and can accomplish its work without relying on people who aren’t part of the team. Does that mean that a Scrum can’t have testers? Of course not. Scrum recognizes that “Individual Development team members may have specialized skills and areas of focus,” including testing. It just means that testers have to be fully part of the development team, and code should be tested throughout the development process, not at the end of a project. What this woman had endured wasn’t Scrum—it was miniature Waterfall with a two week development phase. No wonder she was turned off by it.