Last week in Washington, D.C. I was teaching a test automation class. The class ended up being composed of roughly half developers and half traditional, click-through testers.
An unexpected phenomenon surfaced when we started writing our first tests. The testers were having trouble with Java syntax and the developers were writing very poor tests. Rather than try to work with everyone myself, I used one of my favorite presenter tricks. I had everyone pair up.
It would sound more clever to tell you I planned it this way, but I didn't. And in hindsight, it makes perfect sense. But the give and take, the teamwork that emerged from those exercises was pretty incredible. We had strangers, from different companies, working together like old friends. Everyone in the class said they'd never worked like that before. Testers had worked with testers and developers with developers, but this was a whole new dynamic.
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