Welcome to episode 8 of Inside The Outer Loop, hosted by by Curiosity Software's Huw Price and Rich Jordan! In this follow-up episode with Gunesh Patil, The Liberated Tester, Rich and Gunesh share their insights into what it means to be a liberated tester and how they approached the adoption of agile methodologies!

Rich and Gunesh propose the idea of using squads, working to a blank canvas, can obtain a better level of DevOps and agile ways of working. However, a lack of focus on spinning up teams to do integration testing ahead of bulky end-to-end testing, may lead organisations into a blinkered cargo cult way of working. The cargo cult way of working adds difficulty to sustaining a bi-weekly change cadence, by injected chaos in the system with every incremental change.

In terms of toolsets and architecture, a blank canvas helps squads see what’s not working and thus the challenges to face into. Gunesh suggests that emphasis needs to be on what’s possible to build rather than  on the toolsets alone for avoiding sprints defaulting to mini waterfalls. This holistic approach enables stakeholders are to see and communicate requirements but also data dependencies.

At a high level, this boosts the success rate of a test strategy, as many angles will have already been considered, providing an outcome of good documentation rather than a reliance on head knowledge. In part, model-based testing gets teams making use of this documentation for initial component level testing. This leads to heightened collaboration between stakeholders.

With model-based testing, stakeholders are given the power to easily execute and comment on a system’s architecture at various stages, but also on the technical aspects of components. Isolation and integration can then be explored more freely with bulky end-to-end tests. This leads to a massive gain in time, quality and DevOps speed, and in turn, experimentation and feedback become standard and shared practice between test teams and stakeholders.

Inside the outer loop – brought to you by the Curiosity Software team! Together with industry leaders and experts, we uncover actionable strategies to navigate the outer loop of software delivery, streamline test data management, and elevate software quality. Tune in to transform the way you think about software delivery, quality, and productivity!