Navigating social media I bumped into the Capgemini Word Quality Report 2014-15. After sharing my personal data with Capgemini, I downloaded it and started reading. First of all, it is a very well written document, second the findings are interesting, I will talk about some of its puzzling conclusions some other time.

What I am going to comment on here is one small part in the chapter “Agile Testing: Growing in Acceptance, Still to Fully Mature” and in particular to the finding that the biggest challenge in agile testing according to the report is:

“Lack of a good testing approach that fits with the agile development method”

According to the report 61% of the 1432 respondents (among 1543 CIOs and IT testing leaders) claim this is an issue for their organization and among the issues this is the most widespread.

Can you see the real problem?

The problem is that 61% of the interviewed don’t know what agile testing is about, and that’s the real issue.

Agile testing is an inseparable part of agile software development how can it not fit with itself?

Do you want to know when it will not fit? It will not fit when you try to shoehorn traditional centralized independent testing approaches into an agile development team. Yes in that case it won’t fit at all, in fact, forget it, if you do that you will fail.

Do you really want to be agile? Really? Then forget about Test departments and change the culture in your organization. Software quality is everybody’s responsibility in an agile organization, embrace the change and YOU WILL FIT.