Introducing our Agile Community Q&A’s
We're diving into a series of Q&A sessions featuring our esteemed colleagues and friends from the region. Here Rebecca Hudson, Enterprise Agile Coach, kicks off our inaugural Q&A series. Join us as we ignite a spirit of knowledge sharing within our agile community in 2024!
The idea for this Q&A session came from a number of organic conversations with colleagues and friends around challenges we were facing in our day-to-day roles. At the heart of so many of these challenges seemed to be issues with agile adoption and maturity. Each challenge had its own flavour.
However, there were clear correlations and some obvious themes:
Fear of (past) failures
Struggling to achieve effective collaboration
Struggling to gain shared understanding
Being agile vs. doing agile
Imposing agile
Lack of effective change management
These conversations were always lively, whether we were waxing lyrical about tackling misconceptions and breaking down team barriers or debating the notion of ‘going back to basics’ with agile.
From these conversations a few things became clear to me. In The UAE we have a wonderfully diverse, passionate community of people across all areas of product & software development, change management, design and delivery. We all have a hunger for transformative change, driven by innovative thinking, meaningful collaboration and an innate empathy for people.
These conversations were always lively, whether we were waxing lyrical about tackling misconceptions and breaking down team barriers or debating the notion of ‘going back to basics’ with agile.
In my past roles as Head of Delivery, I've served as a coach and practice lead to my cross-functional teams, supporting them in delivering agile best practices. Simultaneously, I've worked with clients seeking to enhance agility and ensure high quality, despite challenges such as: fixed deadlines, fixed budgets, managing a diverse ecosystem of local and distributed digital partners and vendors, and operating within a traditional operational environment.
In doing so myself and my teams have been faced with the duty of trying to ‘square the circle’ - working with agility in a waterfall world. In these situations not everyone wins, not all goals can be achieved. Where does the balance lie between achieving common company goals, or 'North Stars,' such as ensuring customer satisfaction, fostering team morale, maintaining high quality standards, and promoting growth, particularly in terms of revenue?
There is no simple answer, only passionate people chatting about their challenges, and learning from each other in order to support their teams, organisations and clients, in striving for value-driven business agility.
Given the diversity of clients and colleagues, past & present, that I have the privilege of meeting here in Dubai, I wanted to reach out to individuals in my network from different fields.
With this in mind I reached out to Toyer Mamoojee, Director of QA Engineering at Sopra Banking Software, for my first Q&A session. We first met in early 2020 when he was heading up QA at Mashreq. I was Executive Delivery Director for a global technology consultancy, we had been brought on to build Mashreq’s new retail banking platform on Sitecore. I had always appreciated Toyer’s open and amiable approach to working with us, which afforded us the opportunity to adopt a strong collaborative way of working.
I was also keen to start this series with exploring agile adoption from a QA team’s point of view. A sometimes marginalised discipline, regardless of being at the core of any successful software delivery.
As organisations strive to stay at the forefront of innovative product development, QA has naturally needed to move beyond being something that Testing Engineers undertake at the end of a delivery cycle, and shift into a powerful, foundational activity.
Quality becomes a team’s shared responsibility, generating a higher quality of output, as well as increasing the collaborative nature of delivery and engendering a ‘one team’ approach.
This focus shift requires teams to look at defect prevention as opposed to defect detection, ensuring quality is baked into every task, from inception to release. In this sense quality becomes a team’s shared responsibility, generating a higher quality of output, as well as increasing the collaborative nature of delivery and engendering a ‘one team’ approach.
I’ve heard the terms ‘Whole-Team QA Ownership’ and ‘Quality on all Fronts’ being used to encompass this approach. Personally, the amount of jargon being used in relation to software practices and agility is becoming annoyingly overwhelming.
To avoid the ‘word salad’ of agile-speak, simply put these approaches focus on:
Removing silos between roles
Pairing people for better collaboration & shared understanding
Sharing responsibility for quality across the team
Baking in quality from start to finish
Put simply, progressive QA approaches are born from many of the general challenges that we always seem to circle back to when I speak to my agile colleagues.
In this series of Q&A videos, myself and Toyer discuss subjects which we are especially passionate about. Our aim is to approach each one based on our own professional ‘lived’ experiences and to focus on simplicity. None of this is rocket science. However, a lot can be overlooked simply due to the complexity of organisational systems and the fast moving nature of digital development and product delivery.
Hosted on the Agile-Leads YouTube Channel, check out our videos:
Intro - Exploring QA Success, from an Agile Perspective
1 - Cracking the Code: QA Team Challenges Unveiled!
2 - Agile Frameworks Unleashed: Boost Your QA Game!
3 - Unveiling TDD & BDD: The Ultimate Collaboration Boosters!
4 - Supercharge Collaboration: Top Tools for Distributed QA Teams!
5 - Our Covid Pivot!
6 - Successfully Maturing Agility for QA Teams
7 - Breaking Down Barriers: Agile Adoption Unleashed!
8 - Watch Out: Dangers of Process Imposition!
9 - Retrospective Revelation: Unveiling the Power of Data!
10 - Reach for the Stars: Tips for Personal Development
11 - Navigating QA Communities & Networking for Professional Growth
12 - Expanding Your Knowledge: Certifications & Subjects for Success