Role of Tester, Subject Matter Experts, and Business Owners

From: Julie
Sent: July 16, 2008
To: John Santiago
Subject: UAT ?

Hi John,Hope all is well.We are having a little controversy here on how business acceptance testing should be run. If you could please advise me of which option you have seen most prevalent in your experience with agile methodologies that would be great.

As an end user, SME and tester which business acceptance testing process would you prefer?

1. As you test and find issues you report them and development resolves them quickly for you to re-test and close
2. As you test and find issues you report them and development releases the fixes to test approximately 2 weeks later at which time you would retest and close.

Thanks much for the opinion.
Best Regards,
Julie


Julie,
I think you guys follow Scrum with two week Sprints, so I will focus on that methodology.

SME’s and Business Owners (Product Owners) should be meeting with developers throughout each two week sprint to help clarify requirements and provide guidance. If that’s not happening, then the developers are not asking enough questions to clarify requirements. If they are, this should avoid major misses at Sprint Reviews.

Then, the SME’s and Product Owners should meet at the Sprint Review for 2-4 hours to review the product in detail. At that point, defects and enhancements are added to the Product Backlog and prioritized in or out of the next Sprint during the Sprint Planning Session. SME’s and Business Owners should be participating in the Sprint Planning Session, btw.

So defects and enhancements found in Sprint Review would be two weeks out into the next release according to Scrum, which probably wasn’t what you wanted to hear.

However, you mentioned Testers which is a development team role. Testers should be part of the development team and actively testing code during the actual Sprint and should have a chance to review and approve code before it is deemed complete for the Sprint. This is my opinion, as the specific role of Tester is not well defined in Scrum. I do know that the Scrum teams running at eBags follow this approach and I have done it very successfully as well.

If you have someone who is a SME and a business owner and a tester, you probably have one person with too many roles who will have difficulty interacting well with a Scrum team.

Thanks and good luck!
John