Scrum Team Interview Series: Our Amazing Quality Assurance Team

We’re excited to continue our series of interviews with members of our scrum teams. Today we interviewed Gen Bennett, a Quality Assurance Specialist, and Zack Rowley and Kai Rogers, Sr. Quality Assurance Specialists. Note that Quality Assurance is frequently shortened to QA.

How do you build good relationships with the other members of your Scrum team?

Gen: I think team games and activities are crucial! I know that sounds silly but it really helps you get to know everyone better when you’re in a fun environment instead of only interacting with your scrum team when you’re trying to solve a problem. There’s nothing like shooting paintballs at someone else to bring the team closer! I also think it helps to try to have 1:1s with other team members. You can make standup more exciting by having a daily question or dad joke. Dad jokes really bring out the best (or worst) in everyone. I think having a good relationship with your scrum team is crucial to the team’s success.

Zack: I think the best thing I've done to build relationships on my scrum team is trying to understand their work more. I don't know how to code and I'm not a designer, but when I look at early mocks or have my developer talk through debugging code I can empathize more with their processes. I've felt that empathy builds a lot of trust, and our relationships are much stronger.

Kai: Building relationships with folks on your scrum team is vital to quality testing. As a QA, you’ll often need to ask tough questions and be critical of others' work. Without having a personal relationship with the people on your team it can lead to miscommunication and misinterpretations. Since moving to a hybrid-remote work environment it’s been even more challenging to develop these relationships.

My advice is to treat team activity time as your most important meeting. This may sound odd or even counterproductive at first glance. You may ask, “If I’m playing board games or doing an escape room with my scrum team, is this really a valuable use of my time?”. It absolutely is! Not only is it rewarding on a human level to get to know the people you spend 40 hours a week with, but it also empowers your team to ask the hard questions, or give critical feedback. I believe that a happy and cohesive team builds a happy and cohesive product.

What is the most rewarding part of your job?

Gen: I love working on big changes to the product with my scrum team. It’s awesome to be part of a change that you feel confident will really benefit the user and significantly improve the product. It’s great to be a part of a project all the way from the design process to the actual testing. Also, it’s honestly super fun to find bugs (sorry developers).

Zack: The most rewarding part of my job is getting to work on a team with all different types of people. I love seeing all the moving parts of a scrum team work together to create something great. And feeling like I am contributing to that end result and a vital part of the process is super rewarding to me.

Kai: The most rewarding part of my job is probably the frequent free lunches that Lucid provides. Jokes aside, I’d say the most rewarding part of the job is getting to work with passionate people. Our QA team has a passion for quality and it manifests in many different ways. We’re always looking out for each other, if someone asks for help we jump in and give them the assistance they need. There is no hierarchy in the QA department, folks who have been here for years are more than happy to hop on a call with someone who's been at Lucid for only weeks. It’s invigorating to work alongside people who care about what they are doing and it’s contagious.

What’s up next in our interview series?

We’re going to circle back to our Engineering team and ask a few engineers different questions about their jobs at Lucid.