The recently released state of the testing report exposes a lot of interesting facts and trends in the testing world. This article is an attempt to analyze not so obvious facts seen in the report. Let’s start with the Geographic location data on page 2. The data is a clear indication that the world is flat. Working in distributed mode is the reality, which no one can escape. Even though it is hard to manage processes in a distributed mode, the teams seem to be using a combination of spreadsheets and bug trackers to optimize their testing process.
Nowadays quality assurance teams could leverage sophisticated test management solutions to improve their efficiency and productivity. The same geographic data also throws some challenging questions. The testing team size seems to vary from a handful of testers to 50+. Only 30 – 40 % of the teams appear to have 7+/-2 size, which is the size recommended by Agile methods. Remaining 60% have large team sizes. Agile methods endorse smaller team sizes for efficiency purposes. Moving on to Page 4, the report about the automation testing throws some important questions about large companies. Only smaller organizations seem to be embracing automation testing.
The question is, what is stopping big enterprises from automating the repetitive tasks? Are they not interested in automation? Are they still fixated on technologies like mainframes where automation has a cursory role? There are testers’ professional profile stats on the same page. The presence of roles like “Test lead or a test manager” is an indication that a separate group exists for managing testing. The presence of a separate group is a smell. It is highly recommended to avoid “quality” or “testing” groups in the organization. Having a dedicated group disturbs the cross-functional requirement needed to succeed as one team. Having an independent organization also creates animosity between testing and development team by creating us vs. them mentality.
This barrier causes more non-productive wastes than building an efficient organization. Page 5 data 63% of the testers are driving and managing testing is another reflection of a smell, especially when you look at it from an Agile angle. Many thought leaders have recommended that quality should be built-in, and testing is everyone’s responsibility, not just testers. Seeing the above number is scary because teams seem to be not spending effort in building T-shaped skills. Too much specialization in teams’ leads to waste due to hand-offs.
The 53% of testers are only spending time on retrospectives as mentioned in page 6 is a bit worrisome. What about the rest? Why testers are missing out of retrospectives? As a concluding remark, testing culture needs to change from the Agile perspective. They need to move away of working as a siloed organization towards being part of cross-functional teams. They should thrive more on building T-shaped skills and build development skills.