- The section name "Shift Your Mindset" might seem
a little odd, but by the end of this lesson,
you'll have a good understanding of what we mean.
There's nothing wrong with the old mindset,
but to work on an Agile team, you need a different one.
There is no one right way to go.
The train tracks signal that we can
take many different paths.
We're going to introduce a different way to approach
testing in our product development.
We need an Agile mindset to be open,
to assess progress, and to make corrections.
To build in quality, we need to be continually
retrospecting, setting goals, experimenting, and improving.
When I hire testers, or I talk to testers,
and I ask what their job is,
or what they think their job is,
they'll often say, "Well, we need to find defects
or perhaps go looking at the requirements
and making sure they're all met."
Or maybe even, my least favorite, "To break the software."
There gets to be a lot of finger-pointing.
It's an attitude not appropriate for Agile
because instead of collaborating,
we get a hostile relationship,
so we're asking people to think differently.
Ask "How can we help?"
It makes a huge difference in the collaboration of the team.
We still have to do that other stuff,
but the emphasis is different, others on your team
are not the opposing team, the team works together
to make the product successful.
This sometimes is a new attitude
to some testers, but a lot of testers have been
doing this for years, so keep asking "How can we help?"
It's not only testers that have to change their mindset.
The rest of the team, including the programmers,
they need to be thinking, instead of taking my code
and giving it to somebody else to test,
they need to think a little bit differently.
A lot of times, programmers test their own code
and they do it really, really well,
but sometimes, they have a cognitive bias
that might blind them to some risks.
They're focused on the small chunks,
not seeing the big picture.
If the programmers can start to think about testing
all the time, in fact, if the whole team starts to think
about testing all the time, they work better together,
and that makes for a much more collaborative team.