Jennifer Deman

Jennifer Deman

I function as a ScrumMaster for a Development Team, as a Tester for the same team, and as a coach to the other Scrum Masters and to my engineering management. My current initiatives as ScrumMaster are the following:

• Helping coach our Product Management group in gathering acceptance criteria using BDD
• Developing a set of Working Agreements for our team
• Facilitating meaningful Sprint Retrospectives
• Helping our team understand how to size our backlog
• Coaching our engineering management in Scrum practices (particularly around metrics)
• Mentoring the other Scrum Masters

I began my career at a company in the midst of a grassroots Agile transformation using Scrum. Observing both the potential and the pitfalls of Scrum implementation got me interested in Agile. I then moved to a company that had a successful Agile transformation using Scrum. Seeing such a positive transformation and seeing the benefits to the teams, quality, customer relationships, and profits made me a Scrum zealot. 

I'm interested in the intersection of Quality and Agile. I've observed that the software industry moves between two extremes re: testing. On one side, there's a dismissal of Test as a dedicated role and software developers handle testing programmatically. On the other, QA is a siloed-off role with little interaction with the folks who do the coding. Crossfunctionality and "Quality as a Team Problem" are concepts harped on by every organization, but there is little tangible advice on the ways that can look across the various sectors in software. Some companies have successfully done away with Quality as a role, while others are required to have QA (i.e. companies in red-tape contexts like medicine). I'm currently working on defining Quality at my company from an organizational perspective, a technical perspective, and a functional perspective.