One of the main things I really like about agile is the fact that the whole team are creating and working towards shippable software at the end of each sprint. Well, that’s the theory anyway.
And a positive side effect of this is that you lose the ‘over the wall’ mentality. In a true agile environment there is no ‘them’ and ‘us’. It’s no longer a blame culture. Everyone is responsible for quality. Everyone is responsible for getting the software working. The software is not thrown over the wall to test and then thrown back over for bug fixing.
So it becomes a team activity in the truest sense. We are all working towards a common goal. No one person is responsible for quality – we all are. Sure, there are still individual mistakes but the team rally together to solve these.
And it is great. There’s no bad mouthing, sniping or hushed conversations – well fewer anyway 🙂 It’s all about the product. It’s all about the team. And that, in my eyes, is a really positive thing.