Chapter 4. XP Testing Values

When you get right down to it, most software projects succeed or fail based on the people involved, not the methodology or technology they use. For instance, after reviewing dozens of projects over a span of 20 years, Alistair Cockburn, in "Characterizing People as Non-Linear, First-Order Components in Software Development," states, "Peoples' characteristics are a first order success driver, not a second order one" and are "better predictors of project behavior and methodology success than other methodological factors."

It's easy to see how the characteristics of individual people bear on the success of the project. All things being equal, one would expect a team with more talented individuals to outperform another with less talented members. But a funny thing happens when people get together into teams: the whole is sometimes more and sometimes less than the sum of the parts. New factors begin to operate that involve how each individual feels about the team, what he thinks other individuals feel about the team, and how she thinks the team as a whole feels about her as an individual: team morale, in other words. The effects of morale can be stronger than that of the team members' individual characteristics.

A team that "clicks" can sometimes accomplish things far beyond what seems possible, given the capabilities of the individuals. At the other extreme, a dysfunctional team usually fails, regardless of how "good" individual members may be. As Kent Beck writes in Extreme Programming Explained, "If members of a team don't care about each other and what they are doing, XP is doomed."

Because of the important effect these human factors have on project outcomes, XP actively promotes a focus on the people involved in the project and how they interact and communicate. It articulates a set of shared values that bind the team in a way the 500-page methodology manual cannot: courage, communication, simplicity, and feedback.

Let's look at the way these four values apply to the tester role (the four definitions below are from Merriam-Webster OnLine, www.m-w.com):