Open vs Fully Closed cubicles and its impact on Team QA in Agile Ragavan Ambighananthan
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Transcript of Open vs Fully Closed cubicles and its impact on Team QA in Agile Ragavan Ambighananthan
Open vs Fully Closed cubicles
and
its impact on Team QA in Agile
Ragavan Ambighananthan
Ragavan Ambighananthan, London, UK, +44-7595512264
Agenda
How environment impacts communication ?
How communication or the lack of it affects QA ?
Why QA is affected more than other team members ?
Ragavan Ambighananthan, London, UK, +44-7595512264
Environments and SDLC models I have worked
Cubicle Type SDLC Model Flexi Time
1 Semi-Open Water Fall Yes
2 Fully Closed Water Fall Yes
3 Fully Closed Agile Yes
4 Fully Open ‘super fast’ Agile No
Semi-Open Cubicle
Ragavan Ambighananthan, London, UK, +44-7595512264
Fully Closed Cubicle
Ragavan Ambighananthan, London, UK, +44-7595512264
Fully Open or Open Space
Ragavan Ambighananthan, London, UK, +44-7595512264
Agile, Environment and Communication
The type of environment affects the way we (QA) communicate in Agile
Where you don’t have a PRD and a func spec, the frequency of communication between QA Engineers and team members will be very high.
Not just the communication but minute by minute communication within team members plays an important role in making Agile a “super fast” development modelRagavan Ambighananthan, London, UK, +44-
7595512264
QA communicate a lot than others
QA Team
CM Team
Product Owner
SM
Dev Team
QA Team
CM Team
Product Owner
SM
Dev Team
Fully Open Cubicle: Communication occurs in terms of minutes
Ragavan Ambighananthan, London, UK, +44-7595512264
Why traffic is high from QA Team QA Engineers work on more than one story at a time
Needs to communicate with more than one developer
A defect every half an hour involves communication with development engineer and product owner
Build deployment involves communication with CM
Communication with other QA peers
Ragavan Ambighananthan, London, UK, +44-7595512264
Use Case 1: Open Cubicle and Agile Face to face communication is instant and fast
You are always seeing the team
Occupy less space per engineer
End to end communication is in terms of minutes
Easy to move desk space to create logical teams
Ragavan Ambighananthan, London, UK, +44-7595512264
Delay in Communication caused by environment
QA Team
CM Team
Product Owner
SM
Dev Team
QA Team
CM Team
Product Owner
SM
Dev Team
Fully Closed Cubicle: Communication occurs in terms of hours
Ragavan Ambighananthan, London, UK, +44-7595512264
Use Case 2: Closed Cubicle and Agile Face to face communication is difficult if not
impossible
Nobody can see if a person is inside or not
Occupy more space per engineer, teams span across multiple floors
This combines with flexi time, will be a disaster
End to end communication takes hours to closure
Ragavan Ambighananthan, London, UK, +44-7595512264
Other Environmental impact – Flexi Time
Agile needs whole team to be working together
Flexi time with Agile impacts agility
This can be work-around by having team specific in and out time within a company
Ragavan Ambighananthan, London, UK, +44-7595512264
Other Environmental impact – Resources
Giving QA team bigger (in terms of memory, hard disk) and faster (in terms of CPU) boxes, will increase productivity
It’s a good ROI to give QA engineers more powerful boxes
More “visual paths” with selected different OS
Questions ?