Reflections on Agile Testing, Quality Metrics, and Team Agility

Author Zhang DaMao, a founder of TesterHome and MTSC technical committee expert, introduces his background and the ongoing promotion of tickets for the 10th MTSC conference in Shenzhen.

He recounts his involvement in the 2021 industry testing agility report, his transition from a small QA team leader to leading a larger QA team, and the corporate push for more agile testing practices.

In 2007, after graduating, he joined a foreign company in Shanghai as a Java developer, where Scrum was adopted as the agile framework.

He describes Scrum as a framework rather than a specific process, outlining its roles, short iterative sprints, and the shift from formal meetings to superficial rituals in many organizations.

In 2009, while outsourced to Google for DartEnterprise testing, he experienced a spiral development model with strong engineering culture, extensive unit testing, code reviews, peer testing, and close collaboration between developers and testers.

Later, at an English‑education software company, Scrum board management and BDD drove daily stand‑ups, story‑based development, and test case creation, with automation using Cucumber and Capybara.

By 2014, he moved to Alibaba during the rise of mobile internet, observing increasing overtime and challenging work environments.

He reflects on why testing has become a high‑pressure activity, noting industry maturity, the push for end‑to‑end quality control, left‑right shift, and metric‑driven improvement.

He questions why teams “push others” – attributing it to poor product and development quality – and discusses the diminishing role of product managers in bridging market needs and technical implementation.

He critiques the perception that developers should also test, emphasizing that testing is often seen as a low‑skill, outsourced function, and highlights the importance of soft skills and the pitfalls of over‑measurement.

He stresses the necessity of digitizing and online‑izing testing processes for effective measurement, linking testing metrics to overall development efficiency.

He concludes that true agile testing requires mature quality culture, robust infrastructure, and skilled team members; otherwise, organizations resort to hiring more staff and overtime, and only when automation reduces manual effort will the agile testing era truly arrive.

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