Scrum : What is the Scrum Approach to Managing Quality in a Project?

Generally, in a Scrum environment, the Product Owner’s focus is on business requirements and objectives. The Product Owner, being the Voice of the Customer (VOC), is responsible for communicating the requirements prior to the designing of a product or service to the Scrum Team. He/she should agree the acceptance and done criteria with the team and use them to accept or reject the deliverables once they are developed by the Scrum Team. The Product Owner can benefit greatly from the guidance available from the Scrum Guidance Body (either through quality documents or standards, or from quality experts). These specialists should work with the Product Owner and the customer to ensure the appropriate level of detail and information in the User Stories, since User Stories are the basis for the success of any Scrum project.

 Quality management in Scrum enables customers to become aware of any problems in the project early and helps them recognize if a project is going to work for them or not. In Scrum, quality is about customer satisfaction and a working product, not necessarily meeting arbitrary metrics. This distinction becomes very important from the customer’s point of view because they are the ones investing time and money in the project.

Here is a video on quality management in Scrum: http://www.scrumstudy.com/watch.asp?vid=585

Quality management in Scrum is facilitated through three interrelated activities:

·         Quality planning

·         Quality control

·         Quality assurance

A key benefit of quality planning is the reduction of technical debt. Technical debt—also referred to as design debt or code debt—refers to the work that teams prioritize lower, omit, or do not complete as they work toward creating the primary deliverables associated with the project’s product. Technical debt accrues and must be paid in the future. To maintain a minimal amount of technical debt, it is important to define the product required from a Sprint and the project along with the Acceptance Criteria, any development methods to be followed, and the key responsibilities of Scrum Team members in regards to quality. Defining Acceptance Criteria is an important part of quality planning and it allows for effective quality control to be carried out during the project.

Quality control refers to the execution of the planned quality activities by the Scrum Team in the process of creating deliverables that are potentially shippable. It also includes learning from each set of completed activities in order to achieve continuous improvement. Within the cross-functional team, it is important to have the skills necessary to perform quality control activities. During the Sprint Retrospect Meeting, team members discuss lessons learned. These lessons act as inputs into continuous improvement and contribute to the improvement of ongoing quality control.

Quality is required not only in products, but also in processes. Quality assurance refers to the evaluation of processes and standards that govern quality management in a project to ensure that they continue to be relevant. Quality assurance activities are carried out as part of the work. In fact, quality assurance is a significant factor of the definition of Done. The deliverable isn't complete if appropriate quality assurance has not been conducted. Often, quality assurance is demonstrated during the Sprint Review Meeting.

Product Owners for respective projects, programs, and portfolios can monitor and evaluate quality assurance activities to ensure each team continues to agree and comply with the quality standards that have been set. End-to-end quality assurance may be addressed during final testing of the product, a Release, or a Sprint. A comparison of the number of issues encountered versus the number of User Stories completed can be done. The product components that have defects can be incorporated as Prioritized Product Backlog Items (PBIs), which can be worked upon by either the team or by one person at certain times during the Sprint, depending on the number of defects.

At times, the Scrum Guidance Body can define the processes and documents that can be referred to by Scrum Teams when doing their projects to ensure that uniform quality norms are followed by all projects within the company.