Collaboration Relationship between Developers and QA Members

With skills removed as an inhibitor to early tester involvement, we can then concentrate on the working relationship between developers and testers according to the following guidelines.

• Attach a tester to one or more working pairs of developers to collaborate on creating user stories for the components. The testers then use those user stories as input to creating unit tests.

• In creating user stories, the dialog between developers and testers maintains the benefit to developers of forcing them to think about how to test their components just as current XP practices suggest, but under the critical guidance of a tester. This helps developers think like testers and helps testers understand component implementation and risks.

• Given a component user story, the tester is responsible for the mechanics of creating and validating the test, except for cases in which a test might require elaborate scripting beyond the abilities of a tester or their tool's test representation scheme.

• Regardless of who creates a unit test, it is always the responsibility of developers to ensure that their code passes all available tests before release into a new build. That is, test execution remains the responsibility of the developers.