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Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - 1:00pm - 4:30pm
Half-day Tutorials
TQ

Patterns for Collaboration: Toward Whole-Team Quality

A lot of talk goes on in agile about how collaboration among team members helps drive a shared responsibility for quality—and more. However, most teams don't do much more than just hold stand-up meetings and have programmers and testers sit together. Although these practices improve communications, they are not collaboration! Most teams simply don't understand how to collaborate. Janet Gregory and Matt Barcomb guide you through hands-on activities that illustrate collaboration patterns for programmers and testers, working together. They briefly review the acceptance test-driven development process, then illustrate what programmers should know about testing—and what testers should know about programming—to effectively create whole-team quality. Janet and Matt conclude with visual management techniques for joint quality activities and discuss the shift in the product owner role regarding release quality. Leave with new ideas about collaboration to take back to your organization and make whole-team responsibility for quality a reality.

Janet Gregory, DragonFire, Inc.

Agile testing coach and practitioner Janet Gregory (@janetgregoryca) is the coauthor of Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams and a contributor to 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know. Janet specializes in showing agile teams how testers can add value in areas beyond critiquing the product. For the past ten years, she has been working with teams to transition to agile development.

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Matt Barcomb, odbox

Matt Barcomb (@mattbarcomb) is passionate about building collaborative, cross-functional teams; enjoys being out-of-doors; loves punning; and thrives on guiding organizations toward sustainable, adaptive, and holistic improvement. Matt started programming as a wee lad and eventually wound up getting paid for it. It took him nearly ten years to realize that “people problems” were the biggest issue facing most software development businesses.

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