Challenge – The role of traditional QA, particularly in an Agile practice, typically prevents the team from moving towards a hyper-performing team. QA is still the bottleneck as some, or all, of the testing is done in a manual fashion. Because of this it is more of a waterfall model scrunched into a two week sprint cycle. How do we move faster? How do we become more efficient as a team? How do we reduce time to market for new features and functionality? How do we increase the stability and availability of our applications in production? These are all questions that we needed to answer and find solutions to. Out solution was essentially transform our QA staff to become SDET’s.

Solution – Put together a QA transformation plan to migrate your QA staff from where they currently are in their role into SDET’s. This was not an easy transition and there were many lessons learned along the way…what worked well, what didn’t work well, how to create new roles if they are not interested in going the SDET route (or move the SME’s into new roles), but also how going this direction opens up the door for new opportunities for QA staff, how it also helps increase efficiencies of the SCRUM team, how it builds quality into the code up front, how it increases the stability of the application over time, how it reduces time to market, how it increases team collaboration and communication….the benefits definitely outweigh the negatives.