One of the things that we battled with through the team was when we brought in a dedicated test guy to work on our QA. I don’t think any of the other developers actually had any prior experience of working with dedicated test people. We had limited experience. But also, because we had this emphasis, we wanted developers to take ownership of what they were delivering. So we found that we never really evolved a very good way of working with this guy. He understandably eventually got fed up and he left. We decided not to replace him.
That whole experience coloured our view of having dedicated testers, which I feel we suffered from. I think it is a different thing when we are our own clients actually. At the end of the day a lot of it was being driven by what business we had, and by what works for us. All the developers had good strong working relationships with the paying client. There was good communication in terms of what was wanted and what we were able to tackle.
As we’ve evolved and started to have real clients - real paying clients and so on - the relationship suffered. We don’t work onsite with them and they don’t work onsite with us. We rely on whatever correspondence there is, and some clients are better than others. Often the stronger relationship was with the visiting member who was not necessarily massively great in terms of acting as an intermediary. But we had a team of developers who really wanted to be developers, but if you were nominated for the Project Manager one of your other jobs was to make sure that either you or your team were talking with the client. They wanted to be a tech leader and get on with focusing on the tech stuff. We had no one with a testers voice who would want to go and find out what the client wanted and make sure that we were delivering it, but somehow we got away with it.
We luckily started with a number of clients who were good clients in the sense that although they were paying they were happy with what we were delivering, and so on, so this was okay. Increasingly we’ve had to deal with clients who are very specific. They really do want things. When they’ve said things they don’t you can come up with something different. We’re starting to evolve people - whether they realise this or not - within the organisation for this. But we still don’t have any people who are actually taking a QA tester role, and I think that’s a problem.
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