Scrum : Quality Considerations in Scrum Projects

“Quality is baked in,” we have often heard this statement. But to actually understand what it means in the Agile context, we need to have a QA mind-set. Let’s take an example to understand this. As part of a proposed acquisition, my boss asks me to perform some final due diligence on the development team and its product. We’d already established that the company’s recently launched product is doing well in the market, but I have to make sure we are not about to buy more trouble than benefit. So I spend my time with the development team.

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

I am looking for problems that might arise from having rushed the product into release. I wonder, “Was the code clean? Were there modules that could only be worked on by one developer? Were there hundreds or thousands of defects waiting to be discovered?” And when I ask about the team’s approach to testing, “Quality is baked in” is the answer I get. Because this rather unusual colloquialism could mean just about anything, I press further. What I find is that this is the company founder’s shorthand for expressing one of the quality principles: Bring quality in your development phase itself, rather than waiting for the testing phase. The idea of building quality into their products is at the heart of how agile teams work. Agile teams work in short iterations in part to ensure that the application remains at a known state of quality. Agile teams work in a cross-functional manner, with everyone working side-by-side in every iteration to improve the quality of the product thorough techniques like automation, refactoring, pair programming, integration etc.

Here a dedicated tester is involved throughout the timeline, continuously testing recently developed codes, and integrating them with the existing codes to conduct a functionality test as well. Smoke testing is also encouraged to improve the quality of the demo to be shown to the clients. Learning how to do these things is difficult, and especially so for testers, whose role changes dramatically in an Agile environment. It is important to look at the questions a tester will have in his/her mind while embarking on an agile project, such as:

·         What are my roles and responsibilities?

·         How do I work more closely with programmers?

·         How much do we automate, and how do we start automating?

Once these questions are answered, a tester will be able to perform his/her role in an Agile environment in a much better way.