I know one guy who was great at testing but got sacked because he wasn’t any good at scrum. Huh. How good do you need to be at scrum to be any good or no good at it. You can teach people scrum in about 5 minutes as all you need to do is teach them how the daily scrum works, the pre-planning meetings, the post-sprint review meeting and the product and testing backlog. It is spoken about as if it’s the most important thing in the world but it makes no difference to me. I still test software the same way as if I’m on a non-scrum project. I’ve actually had a conversation with someone who’s keen on scrum about whether we do scrum to generate software or we write software to do scrum.

What is good about the version of scrum we practice is that the test conditions – called test confirmations – are tacked onto the back of the user story at about the same time as the coder is doing his bit. I check out the user story and derive the test confirmations and add them to the end of the user story. The coders soon realise that the user stories have got the test confirmations and obviously start reading them and realise all of the grisly tests I’m going to do. This has the effect of them hardening their code so that it deals with my test confirmations, and even better, they start running some of my tests as their unit tests. Talk about a win-win situation. They find most of the bugs that I would have found before I even get sight of the system, so by the time I do get to play with the software most of the bugs have already been sorted out. Of course I still test all the test confirmations but most pass OK.

So what have we done here? My test confirmations are acting as a secondary interpretation of the requirements, almost a confirmation of them and for some reason they are now taken more seriously by the developers. Without the developers seeing the test confirmations, say they were written in a separate document, then their testing wouldn’t have been as deep and they would have handed over a system that worked OK but I’d tear it to pieces.

That part of our scrum variation is worth its weight in gold.