The strenght of the UNGUESS Community: understanding their opportunities and secrets

The work on the internal community is still growing. Currently, several testers are involved in specific activities organized according to the basic values of the Exponential Organization of Salim Ismail.

UNGUESS (the former AppQuality) embraces these new organizational techniques and aims to create a world around user research. Article after article, we will let you discover the “behind the scenes” of the community!

MUCH MORE THAN A TESTING COMMUNITY

The UNGUESS structure expresses its key value: the crowdsourcing accompanied with the “Tester First” philosophy.

The Crowd is, in fact, the UNGUESS driving force: 95% of its resources comes from the crowd, while the internal staff represents a 5%.

Therefore, the community not only performs testing activities, but is encouraged to take roles such as tester leader, tester coach and tester assistant, which you can get more information in this article. But not only that, some testers are also part of Agile Teams (the guilds and the squads) with the aim of growing, training and activating the Community in which each tester, according to their skills, can participate in the evolution of the team, improving the service offered to the customers.

WHAT ARE THE GUILDS AND SQUADS AND HOW DO THEY WORK?

Let’s start with the Guild. With Guild we mean a working group of testers (temporary or permanent) that deals with carrying out vertical activities within the Community. A guild is driven by the objectives of the entire AppQuality ecosystem (“increase in test quality and performance”) and are teams created entirely in collaborative mode. Most of these teams are freelancers or occasional collaborators.

The strengths of these working groups are the fact of being agile and scalable through the shared expertise, provided intercommunication, participation and continued evolving lean processes.

At present, there are:

• Functional Guild
• UX Guild
• Training Guild
• Recruiting Guild
• Assistance Guild
• Cybersecurity Guild

The Squad instead, are working groups guided and hired by members of the AppQuality internal team, they perform cross-cutting activities and functions at the “service” of the different Guilds and of the entire UNGUESS ecosystem. At their guide, there are the Admin, more experienced members, not necessarily full time on the Team Community who also come from other UNGUESS teams.

The types of Squad are 3:

• Operations Squad
• Technology Squad
• Communication Squad

These are just some of the news, but they already represent another step towards a new vital and fruitful collaboration with testers that aims to work on new projects and the constant growth of the entire organization.

Don’t miss the next events on the evolution of the Crowd Team!