No man is an island

What’s the most common reason for failure in a software project, or perhaps in any project? You will get many different answers depending on who you ask. The designers might say “The requirements were not clear enough and the programmers didn't follow the architecture”. Testers on the other hand might say “The programmers never delivered what we were supposed to get when we were supposed to get it” and programmers tend to say “We got lots of ‘bug-reports’ that where really outside the scope”. The list can be long, but at the end of the day it all comes down to lack of communication.

Let’s face it, developing software is a complex and creative handiwork. That’s why we try to stay away from the over-planned, defined, way of waterfall and turn to iteration based approaches like RUP or Scrum. True iterations give us great feedback to base the next, (hopefully) better, version on. However, working with iterations is not enough. The saying “No man is an island” origins back to about year 1600 and is as true as ever when it comes to software projects. For many years we have set up the projects so that specialist testers form a test team, specialist designers form a design team, specialist programmers form implementation teams, and so on. This for sure brings advantages in having specialists learning from each other becoming even more specialised. But it also introduces a great deal of hand-overs between the teams, each missing some vital information. I believe this way of organising the development project is one of the key reasons why projects fail.

In the agile community we talk about “Cross-functional teams“, meaning that people with different specializations work together to achieve a common goal. In software development that means that a programmer sits next to a designer and a tester, working together on transforming a requirement into a piece of well designed, well tested code ready for production. The agile practices are all about maximizing communication, e.g. by locating people in the same room with access to broadband communication aids such as whiteboards.

If you are currently in a project where the test team and development team sit at different floors and the primary tool for communication is release notes, then you have a superb opportunity to increase the likeliness of project success just by re-locating so that developers and tester form collaborative teams working together on both design, test design, implementation and test execution.