#007 – Augmenting the Agile Team: A Testing Success Story with Mike Hrycyk

Mike Hrycyk has been trapped in the world of quality since he first did user acceptance testing 19 years ago. He believes in creating a culture of quality throughout software production and tries hard to create teams that hold this ideal and advocate it to the rest of their workmates. He has worked many roles, but always returning to testing. Mike is currently the Director of Quality for PQA Testing.

In this episode, Derek and Ron chat with Mike Hrycyk about his experience using a regression testing team to augment feature teams, handling the testing regression cycle while the feature teams (developers and testers) do new development. He makes a compelling case and his story of success is well worth the listen.

Where to find Mike Hrycyk

@qaisdoes on Twitter

On the web at qaisdoes.com

Enjoy the show and be sure to follow Ardent Development on Twitter.

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Transcript

Ron: We are joined today with Mike Hrycyk who has been trapped in the world of quality since he first hit his user acceptance testing 19 years ago. He has survived all the different levels, and a wide spectrum of technologies and environments to become the quality dynamo that he is today. Mike believes in creating a culture of quality through software production and tries hard to create teams that hold this ideal and advocate it to the rest of their workmates. Mike’s currently the director of quality for PQA Testing but has previously worked in social media management, parking, manufacturing Web photo retail music delivery kiosks and railroad. So welcome to the show, Mike

Mike: Thank you. Glad to be here.

Derek: It’s good to have you Mike.

Ron: Glad to have you. Now you just finished up at a conference. We thought we’d have you on to talk a little bit about your first talk that you gave there are. Augmenting the gentle team, a testing success story. Could you give us started on that topic, Mike.

Mike: Well sure, for sure. So Agile for me is a bit of a passion, I think. I really believe in the power of Agile. But one of the things that I’ve learned in working with people who do Agile is that when when people self teach or when they have bad coaches people seem to believe that there’s a right way to do Agile, that there’s one way to do Agile and they go out and they find a how to guide for how to do Agile and it teaches you how to implement it. But the problem with that is that every situation is incredibly different and that Agile isn’t really set up to be a how to guide it’s set up. It has a manifesto, it’s a set of concepts and it’s something that everyone who adopts it has to figure out how to do it right. And so I had a project that we did with one of our clients so, we’re testing as a service company. And we got involved with one of our clients where we did an assessment and helped them figure out what they needed to to be successful and some of the work they were doing. And one of the things that that we were looking at with them was is what they’re doing, is it doing Agile wrong, is it doing it right? And I have this personal mission to make sure that no one believes that you’re doing Agile wrong as a term that you can hear. I’m not sure if you guys are familiar with the concept but when I hear that it just makes me angry because Agile is an iterative approach to everything and it’s the way that there’s no way that it needs to be done. You’re doing it right, if it’s working for you. And so this talk that I put together is sort of a case study from a project where we did take and went way off the standard realm of Agile and did it our own way. And I wanted I