Thus the persons who have most need of the information are those who capture
it. If testers are distributed among development teams they are in a good position to capture and maintain
these requirements.
The purpose of agility is to be able to react fast to market changes and emerging requirements. If the
price of agility is too high in terms of poor quality code or delayed time-to-market (because of the
confusion agility can generate) then either an ???agile??? approach isn??™t or you haven??™t managed the consequences
well enough.
4.5 Starting from Where You Are
This is always where you are urged to start. Here are 4 scenarios:
4.5.1 You??™re Not Really Testing
It??™s not our job to find bugs.
Test manager of an Italian bank
People lose the plot and so do organizations. There are those who want appearances above all else. The
Italian bank was one. A major energy utility was another. They had test coordinators who waved their
hands about and steadfastly refused to find problems. The bank test manager was eventually sacked and
the utility was sold, handing over all its testing to a big-5 consultancy as soon as they realized that not
one of the 25+ systems being developed, worked.
How could this occur? Big organizations can themselves become entropic and lose the plot (see [Farrell-
Vinay] for more on incompetence). In this case political power, and position maintenance, override any
concern for the well-being of the organization.
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