Open vs Fully Closed cubicles

and

its impact on Team QA in Agile

Ragavan Ambighananthan

Ragavan Ambighananthan, London, UK, +44-7595512264

Agenda

How environment impacts communication ?

How communication or the lack of it affects QA ?

Why QA is affected more than other team members ?

Ragavan Ambighananthan, London, UK, +44-7595512264

Environments and SDLC models I have worked

Cubicle Type SDLC Model Flexi Time

1 Semi-Open Water Fall Yes

2 Fully Closed Water Fall Yes

3 Fully Closed Agile Yes

4 Fully Open ‘super fast’ Agile No

Semi-Open Cubicle

Ragavan Ambighananthan, London, UK, +44-7595512264

Fully Closed Cubicle

Ragavan Ambighananthan, London, UK, +44-7595512264

Fully Open or Open Space

Ragavan Ambighananthan, London, UK, +44-7595512264

Agile, Environment and Communication

The type of environment affects the way we (QA) communicate in Agile

Where you don’t have a PRD and a func spec, the frequency of communication between QA Engineers and team members will be very high.

Not just the communication but minute by minute communication within team members plays an important role in making Agile a “super fast” development modelRagavan Ambighananthan, London, UK, +44-

7595512264

QA communicate a lot than others

QA Team

CM Team

Product Owner

SM

Dev Team

QA Team

CM Team

Product Owner

SM

Dev Team

Fully Open Cubicle: Communication occurs in terms of minutes

Ragavan Ambighananthan, London, UK, +44-7595512264

Why traffic is high from QA Team QA Engineers work on more than one story at a time

Needs to communicate with more than one developer

A defect every half an hour involves communication with development engineer and product owner

Build deployment involves communication with CM

Communication with other QA peers

Ragavan Ambighananthan, London, UK, +44-7595512264

Use Case 1: Open Cubicle and Agile Face to face communication is instant and fast

You are always seeing the team

Occupy less space per engineer

End to end communication is in terms of minutes

Easy to move desk space to create logical teams

Ragavan Ambighananthan, London, UK, +44-7595512264

Delay in Communication caused by environment

QA Team

CM Team

Product Owner

SM

Dev Team

QA Team

CM Team

Product Owner

SM

Dev Team

Fully Closed Cubicle: Communication occurs in terms of hours

Ragavan Ambighananthan, London, UK, +44-7595512264

Use Case 2: Closed Cubicle and Agile Face to face communication is difficult if not

impossible

Nobody can see if a person is inside or not

Occupy more space per engineer, teams span across multiple floors

This combines with flexi time, will be a disaster

End to end communication takes hours to closure

Ragavan Ambighananthan, London, UK, +44-7595512264

Other Environmental impact – Flexi Time

Agile needs whole team to be working together

Flexi time with Agile impacts agility

This can be work-around by having team specific in and out time within a company

Ragavan Ambighananthan, London, UK, +44-7595512264

Other Environmental impact – Resources

Giving QA team bigger (in terms of memory, hard disk) and faster (in terms of CPU) boxes, will increase productivity

It’s a good ROI to give QA engineers more powerful boxes

More “visual paths” with selected different OS

Questions ?