Maaret Pyhäjärvi (F-Secure Corp, Finland) & Llewellyn Falco (Spun Laboratories, USA) –

We all struggle to get our ideas heard in a team, to learn new ideas and technologies. We are tripped up by misunderstandings. Communication failures go undetected for too long. Bugs get reported but never acted upon. Initiatives can wither on the vine.

How much better could we do if we had properly functioning teams? If people could be brave enough to try new things, and humble enough to listen to everyone’s contributions?
There are many things that testers bring to software development. Unfortunately, a lot of times they have to fight to get their voices heard and their contributions are received negatively.

We’ve been experimenting with new ways of working together by actually working together.

We have found that working on the same thing, at the same time, in the same space and at the same computer allows testers to contribute more and be appreciated for their contributions. We call this process mob testing: working as a group on testing tasks or testers joining a group working on bits of production code.