A creative way to present a test strategy to your team

Last week I was checking what was going on the testers.io slack team, and I noticed some comments from Mark Winteringham about test strategies, I among other people commented on the same topic, then Mark mentioned one time he crafted a test strategy in the form of a ludo board.

I became intrigued with that approach and asked Mark for some more details of it, he commented briefly about the general idea, I still couldn't picture it entirely, so last Sunday after my 2 childs went to sleep I started creating one, the idea of this approach is to serve as a general guideline on the responsibilities of each "specialist" within a cross-functional team working under scrum on regards of software quality.

First let's take a look at a blank ludo board:

As you can see the board has 4 squares where the tokens are placed and the goal is to bring them all to the center.

In my case I labeled the center as quality strategy, And assigned each square to an "specialist" area, in the case of my team, there's one BAs, another one for Developers, Another for testers, and last but not least, one for the Scrum Master and product Owner, so I got something like this:

Click to enlarge

Since not all team members have had experience with scrum, I started by filling out the responsibilities that each role has had in my previous experiences at other companies. The next step was to socialize this with my team, so I had separate quick conversations with some Devs, my BAs, Scrum Master and fellow test engineering colleagues, we came to agreements on responsibilities, always emphasizing cross-functional team collaboration, how I as a tester could help my Devs, BAs, SM, PO, and vice versa.

This approach was greatly received in my team, so right now we're in the process of getting some printed copies so we can hang them in the walls in our office space.

Hope this is useful for you, and in case you follow this approach, I invite you to blog about your experience.

Also, last but not least, huge thanks again to Mark Winteringham for sharing this on slack.