Whole-Team Approach in Agile

Whole-Team approach is the major feature of Agile development. It promotes team chemistry by daily interactions and progress sharing. In this post, I am going to discuss about whole team approach and its benefits.

The whole team approach means involving different people with specific skill set and knowledge which are required for project success. An ideal agile team includes testers, developers and business representatives. The idea is to have a small team, anywhere between 3 to 9 team members per agile team who would work on the same workspace. As I mentioned in my previous article Role of a tester in agile team, co-location is really important to facilitate daily interactions and effective communication.
Daily stand-up meetings are conducted in whole-team approach where all the team members communicate and analyze the work progress. They also mention all the roadblocks or concerns in daily meetings which required to be handled in order to meet the sprint deadline. Below are some of the benefits of whole team approach:

• It promotes more effective and efficient team dynamics
• Enhances collaboration within the team
• Provides a motivational and supported work environment
• Leverage the different skill set of team members in project success
• Ensures that the quality is a shared responsibility

Here, tester's responsibilities include:

• Collaborating with business representatives to help them in creating acceptance test cases
• Working with developers on test strategy
• Working with developers on test automation approaches
• Transfer and extend testing knowledge to other teams

The whole team is involved in all the meetings related to analyzing the product, estimating the work efforts and new features to be added. The whole team approach not only benefits the team at the behavioral level but helps in success of the project by ensuring that every team member takes care of the quality.