The Agile Toolkit Podcast I always say that DevOps in one sense is really an extension of agile principles out to everybody on the ship. -Jeffery Payne Bob Payne chats with Jeffery Payne, Founder of Coveros, at Lean+Agile DC 2018.  The Payne Cousins (not really) chat DevOps and tips for pairing developers and testers.  The discussion covers moving toward a generalized specialist model, testers showing up like a demolition crew, and the true meaning of pairing. [caption id="attachment_7988" align="alignnone" width="2024"] Jeffery Payne sits down with Bob Payne (not cousins..)[/caption] TRANSCRIPT Bob Payne: [00:00:02] Hi I'm your host and technical idiot, Bob Payne. Just struggling with the equipment there for a little bit, making making the the the big newbie mistake of hitting play instead of record. So I'm here at Lean + Agile DC 2018 and I'm here with Jeff Payne of Coveros. Jeffery Payne: [00:00:25] Your cousin right. Bob Payne: [00:00:26] Yeah. Cousin Jeffery Payne: [00:00:27] Yeah. Bob Payne: [00:00:27] Yep. So Jeff what what are you talking about here today since I am out here in the hall and not not in the talks. Jeffery Payne: [00:00:38] Yes I'm talking about dev test pairing. Okay so trying to get developers and testers to work together better. We find that that's one of the biggest issues we see on teams when it comes from engineering perspective. Bob Payne: [00:00:52] Yeah I mean I think the early agilists were a lot of XP teams that sort of did away with testers because everybody was considered to be a tester. I think it was also sort of a chemistry of the particular group of folks that were on that first team. And you had folks like Elizabeth Hendrickson, Lisa Crispin. A lot of folks sort of brought testing back into the Agil fold. Yeah what do you think the biggest problems you see with testing and agile teams or trying to get testers and coders to pair? Jeffery Payne: [00:01:31] Yeah I think obviously one of the biggest problems is that they historically haven't worked well together. They're kind of on different sides of the fence as a check and a balance in some organizations right. Jeffery Payne: [00:01:42] And and a lot of organizations even they prefer that their testers not even talk to their developers they want them to be independent speak because they think it's kind of like an editor if if you haven't seen it and then you review it another set of eyes you're not you know you're not influenced by the development. The other sort of clean room actually that's the traditional approach. Of course it's always been very late lifecycle and very manual right. None of those things work well on edge. All right. Bob Payne: [00:02:11] Well none of those things actually work well in life. It's not just an agile thing. Jeffery Payne: [00:02:16] So you know how do we change that? Bob Payne: [00:02:17] Shoot, it's not secure and doesn't scale. I'm glad we have 12 hours to fix this before production. Jeffery Payne: [00:02:22] Yeah, Exactly. Here you go have it done by tonight. So yeah. And so what we try to help teams fix that. Bob Payne: [00:02:30] Yeah. Jeffery Payne: [00:02:30] Address those issues. Bob Payne: [00:02:33] What are you what do you think has been most beneficial recently for helping you in that in that quest of getting folks to pair together. Jeffery Payne: [00:02:42] Well we have some techniques and approaches that we like to use to try to get them to work together and also learn from each other because you know if you're moving toward a generalized specialist model on your teams we like that model. Yup and you want collective code ownership and you want a whole team quality all these you know motherhood and apple pie concepts that we espouse too. You've got to get everybody productive during the entire Sprint or whatever you're doing story development or whatever. And the only way you can do that is that people start learning from each other and cross fertilize. Historically you know I was a developer