Extreme Programming Challenge Twenty Three

Our testers are in a separate group.

The culture here is such that developers architect, then design, then write code and unit test, and the testers (called CertificationGroup?) do the functional testing, load testing, configuration testing, and QA. That group is pretty good at their job, using automated test suites, etc.

The developers (and our management) are ready to embrace XP. Iterative developement, automated unit test, pair programming, etc, but no product is leaving this place unless the CertificationGroup? OKs it.

The challenge I have is this: is it OK to let the CertificationGroup? write the functional tests? The way that seems politically expedient would be to have someone from the CertificationGroup? be on our team, but only writing functional tests. The developers would write test-first unit tests and the code. Marketing would prioritize the stories.

One problem I see is that the test member would have to be involved in all of the discussions with marketing, or they would not know what functional tests to write.

Thoughts, comments?

Sounds reasonable. What if they don't find any problems?

no product is leaving this place unless the CertificationGroup? OKs it.

This seems to be a nomenclature problem. If you rename what the CertificationGroup? call 'functional tests' to 'acceptance tests', then you could rename the CertficationGroup? to OnsiteCustomer (or at least a CustomerProxy).

See ExtremeProgrammingChallenge