A couple of years ago, I had to assess the testing maturity of a company that was practicing Agile/scrum. The maturity model that I needed to use was TPI Next. At the end of the assessment the model showed a lot of areas for improvement. The improvements that would result in a more mature organization according to the model, would in my opinion not benefit the organization. So why did my opinion and the model differ so much? The reason was the Agile/scrum context. The model steers an organization to more structure, where Agile/scrum asks for flexibility. The context of this company required a different view on what needed to improve. That’s when Polteq decided to put effort in creating a test improvement model for this specific context: TI4Agile .
Since the introduction of TI4Agile a couple of years ago, it has been successfully applied many times in different contexts. I have analyzed the results of these assessments and found common challenges with Agile testing maturity that are interesting to share. It appears that many organizations have a low maturity in the following areas, which are a subset of the twelve key areas of TI4Agile:
Test management and test process share some problems in the transition to Agile development. Both areas were introduced into the traditional testing world to provide more structure to testing. The flexibility and adaptability that is needed in the current Agile context, requires large changes in how to approach test management and test processes.
Test automation has gained a more prominent role in the Agile context, to facilitate iterative and incremental development with fast feedback loops. The increase in importance is recognized by organization, but often lacks professionalism. Therefore this area lacks maturity.
And last but not least, self-organizing teams require more and better interaction between the team members. Scrum facilitates the interaction in the different meetings that form the basis of the development process. To gain most value out of these meetings, the purpose of these meetings must be clear to all participants. The team members must be able to switch between very technical topics and complex business situations.
Jeroen Mengerink
