What are the Quality Assurance and Software Configuration Management roles and responsibilities with Extreme Programming?
We prefer for there to be a separate organization for functional testing (probably exactly like your QA function, with testing results made public very quickly). XP, however, only says that there must be functional tests: it does not specify organizationally how they must be done. Experience is that testing is best done by a separate function – but one that is very tightly integrated with development rather than at the end of a long pipeline. Configuration management is also up to the team. It is usually necessary to have one or more individuals responsible for CM. We have no special rules or practices addressing how a group would manage the requirement to build multiple systems from one code base. Our main approach would be: for each release configuration, there must be corresponding functional tests, and these must be run before that configuration is released to the (real) customer. We would think that development would proceed by running kind of a “union” of all the functional tests
