Communication between Developers and Testers in Distributed Continuous Agile Testing

Software developers and testers have to work together to achieve the goals of software development projects. In globally distributed software projects the development and testing are often scattered across multiple locations forming virtual teams. Further, the distributed projects are so complex that none of team members can possibly possess all the knowledge about the project individually. During testing in such teams, developers and testers need to coordinate and communicate frequently. However, coordination is affected by the availability of the project information, which is distributed among different project members and organizational structures. Many companies are facing decisions about how to apply agile methods in their distributed projects. These companies are often motivated by the opportunities of solving the coordination and communication difficulties associated with global software development. In this paper we investigate the communication between testers and developers in two teams from two software companies performing continuous agile testing in a distributed setting. We describe four communication practices used by the team: handover through issue tracker system, formal meetings, written communication and coordination by mutual adjustment. We also discuss communication between testers and developers in collocated versus distributed testers and developers. We have found that early participation of the testers is very important to the success of the handover between testers and developers. The communication between developers and testers is not sufficiently effective through written communication and that it changes depending on the type of the tasks and experience of the testers.