What is Whole-Team Approach?
Whole-Team Approach in Agile Development advocates involving the people with right skillset into Agile Development project to ensure the successful delivery.
The Agile team should include members from the customer and other business stakeholders to determine the features of the product.
The whole-team approach suggests that quality is the responsibility of the whole Agile project team including Developers, Testers, Business Analysts, Business stakeholders and other people involved in the project.
Co-location is also important for the whole-team approach as it promotes daily communication and collaboration among the team.
Daily standup meeting is conducted in the whole-team approach to check the work progress and resolve any blockers for any of the team members.
Small teams of 3 to 9 members should be formed in order to achieve maximum benefits of the whole-team approach and ensure successful project delivery.
For any feature discussions or elaborations, testers, developers and business representatives are involved which ensures everyone understands the feature correctly.
The concept of involving testers, developers and business analysts is known as three Amigos or power of three.
What are the benefits of Whole-Team Approach?
- As co-location is highly recommended in the whole team approach, it enhances daily collaboration and communication within the whole Agile project team
- Since the whole-team approach involves members with a different skill set, it is very helpful for team members to leverage that skill set for project delivery
- Quality is not only testing teams responsibility, but whole team is also responsible for the quality of product delivered
- Testers, developers, and business representatives work together in the whole development process to ensure the desired product quality is achieved
- Testers work closely with developers to leverage coding skills in their Automation Testing and also extend testing knowledge to other team members
- All members of the team are involved in any product future discussions, analysis or estimation, which ensures everyone in the team is on the same page
