Are you here to produce better software?

Pete Deemer, the scrum coach and trainer was holding a question hour for one of the scrum teams in our company. One of the developer expressed resistance to testing code instead of a qa member testing the code.

Previously, the scrum master had repeatedly suggested to this team that developers should do some testing that normally QA does as they have smaller QA capacity. Developers were reluctant to do that.

The team member who brought up this point during the question hour strongly felt that scrum master is pressurizing them to do QA. The team member thought that he does not have the necessary skills (automation etc.) and in spite of that Scrum master is pressurizing the team.

Clearly it was a revolt against developers doing QA. Pete listened to him attentively while he was venting off his strong resistance for testing. After he was done with expressing his anger over the developers being asked to do QA, Pete asked a simple question: "Are you here to only produce code or to produce better software?". Pete further added, "if you think you are here for producing better software, then you should do everything that is needed to produce better software. That includes testing, setting up machines, merging branches etc!"

I think this question is a very important tool to scrum masters. Developers need to think again and evaluate why they are here. If the answer is - they are in the team to produce better software then they should be willing to do all the other stuff that developers generally don't like.