Just this morning, it appeared to me, and there the solution was to all our problems. It had been there, so directly in front of my face, that I haven’t seen it, but it is so clear now.

We need to separate testing from the act of programming.

Wow. That’s a statement. But I’m serious. It has never worked and the large amounts of failing teams with Scram or Krumban, or whatever they call it, got it wrong. Yeah, Agile got it wrong. Collaboration is for the weak. After having spent over fifteen years with this crap, we need to get our bricks for the silos out from the closet again, and build up walls between those teams. Give testers different offices, on different floors, in different buildings, heck, what am I saying, give them different planets to be on, so they communicate mainly over the bug tracking system.

And I want to see a test plan, with every written detailed test up-front. Now. Show me. And I want to see Gantt chart based progress report, every week, and every day or even twice a day if there is an escalation. And I don’t want to spent time on re-planning. The initial plan must hold. Test design documents are fixed after being created initially. Yeah, that’s what we’re going to do.

While we’re at it, is there a way to get that waterfall model more heavy? How much celebration may we add to it? Just that? Come on, give me more than just the usual bug metrics and that crap. I want three additional testing cycles in the end. And I want QA to approve every delivery we make. Sure, they have to sign it. On paper, three copies to each major division head. Exactly.

If you haven’t figured yet, this is a rant about a personal Black Swan that a friend of mine just told me about his replaced management. Exactly, they’re separating the collaboration between programmers and testers, dividing them, right now, in this century, nearly ten years after the Agile manifesto and it’s focus on team-values, and cross-functional teams. This manager made the experience that developers and testers agree upon a delivery in a dysfunctional way. Therefore he wants to separate them again. And every major change project is failed if it is not implemented after 90 days. I’m not that good as a clairvoyance, so, what would you suggest my friend to do next?