Best way to strengthen teamwork between development and QA departments?

Question

I work as the Sysadmin for both the development and QA departments of a software development company. I support both teams equally. Recently I was asked for some ideas on how to improve inter-team communication.

First, what are some ways to improve the relationship between a development and QA team, from the developer's point of view?

Second, what are some things you look for from a System Administrator as far as interaction? Leave you alone? Email? IM? Personal office-time? How can I improve my relationship with developers?

Answer 1

Out of job context activities like sport or restaurant eating at lunch time.

Getting people to know better each other in other things than job helps building trust and links between two groups.

Answer 2

Involve the QA people as early as possible. If you're doing agile, they are a part of the team. Even if you aren't they can still offer valuable insight into how the code can be made better by making it more testable and thus avoid problems further down the line.

Answer 3

Proper management is a good start. I would say just getting the two groups to succeed or fail together is the most important. You want the two to have some friendly competition (one tries to find bugs while the other tries to prevent that from happening) but in the end they need to be considered part of the same team. Team lunches and other activities are always a good idea.

Answer 4

The QA and development teams at my place of employment get along very well because we sit geographically close to one another. This eliminates the loop of "open defect-send to dev-dev close defect" that seems to foster passive-aggressive annoyance. Clear and open communication between the two groups and clear expectations are always expected. Other than that, standard team building exercises are a good start. We have departmental lunches, picnics, lawn games in the warmer months, etc.

As far as administration style, talk to your employees and see what works for them. Some enjoy being left alone with sporadic updates, others like constant feedback. You must do what's comfortable for your developer and you.

Answer 5

I think it would be very beneficial to involve the Developers in helping develop(or help use ones that are already developed) tools for automated testing - that way the whole QA process will be improved and the Developers will have better insight in testing and also both teams will communicate more doing so. I think as a Developer that it would be fun to work on such a project.

Answer 6

Depends on the size of your organization, but stop thinking of them as two separate groups. If you're the only sysadmin, I'm guessing your organization isn't huge.

Integrate them physically. Don't have dev in one area and QA in another. Have them share offices/cubes next to each other.

Taking people out to lunch? Take them together. Grabbing a beer? Do it with folks from both groups.

Answer 7

Co-locate and treat them as a cross-functional team. If QAs want to write code (like acceptance tests) let them. If developers want to QA some other part of the system (not code they worked on). Let them and have both groups (if you want to view them as separate entities) work together solving the problem.