Everyone Owns Quality? Really? - Gitte Ottosen

Are Cross-Functional Teams Really Working? Deep Skills vs. Shallow Roles in Agile

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"When we expect that everybody is supposed to do everything, then nobody does anything really good." - Gitte Ottosen

In this episode, I talk with Gitte Ottosen about cross functional teams, quality engineering, and how deep skills fit in agile work. We question the Everyone owns quality mantra. If all own it, who does the hard parts. Gitte calls out mechanical agile and the comb shape myth that makes people wide and shallow. We talk about what Scrum expects from a team and why testers still bring sharp value. AI may take easy tasks, yet we need critical thinking and solid test design to judge its output.

Gitte Ottosen is a test manager and quality coach with a strong focus on a value driven approach to software development. She has 30 years of experience in IT, primarily within test, test management and process improvement, in both traditional and agile contexts. She is focusing on supporting a quality mindset across teams and organizations in Denmark. As a self-confessed test and agile evangelist who preaches the need for a strong quality and value driven focus, Gitte is a strong advocate for a context-driven approach, a role requiring profound professional insight, passion, and persistence—qualities that she holds in abundance. Gitte is a dedicated trainer within the areas of agile and test and is a regular speaker at international conferences.

Highlights:

• Quality engineering fails when teams lack testing maturity—broad responsibilities create shallow skills, not excellence.
• Everyone responsible for quality often means no one owns it—teams need specialists, not combs.
• Scrum's "developer team" means specialists who deliver value, not just software developers—testers belong.
• AI can generate tests, but without test design knowledge, testers can't review or trust the output.
• Testers add value by supporting requirements upfront, not just testing at the end.