(In this SmartBits, Sudhir Patnaik outlines “ Transforming test teams “. The video is at the end of this blog)
As a leader running platform engineering organization, industry changes made us reimagine how we test software platforms. We decided that in the context of extreme ownership mindset by Scrum team it is best that we transform quality engineering organization and merge them with Scrum teams.
This required us to look at the entire quality engineering organization, find out people well-versed in functional, performance testing and security testing, and automation. In a step-by-step process, we did a shift left of quality engineering organization, re-skilling many engineers towards learning the development technologies. We moved one function at a time into the respective Scrum team, and gave them about a year to transform themselves into developers. We provided every training that was needed.At the same time, we also trained developers to embrace functional testing concepts. If one is the owner of a service, one owns its unit testing, code review and its functional testing too.
From Quality Engineering perspective this meant that half of quality engineering organization ended up merging with the Scrum team and transforming themselves into developers in a period of one year. The remaining half of the team still stay as a central organization, but largely responsible for end-to-end and non-functional testing.
They are not executors of end-to-end and non-functional testing scripts, they have transformed themselves to become more creators of tools, frameworks and scripts that are needed to get these done. Then who executes those – “Well it is the Scrum team”!
