In an agile environment, Quality assurance should be an integral part of the production process. A good practice is to bring the QA testers into the daily stand-ups from day one and involve them in the sprint planning. It is even advised to have QA in customer calls. When QA hears the customers’ expectations directly, you save a lot of wasted testing time. Once QA knows about the process, they will be able to manage their time more efficiently by performing the right mix of regression and exploratory testing, instead of only focusing on verifications and validations.
In an agile environment, a tester has to understand the agile management and methodologies. Testers should have excellent interpersonal communication skills, as they are required to interact with clients as well as fellow developers. Honest communication is crucial for ensuring that the deadlines are met and the quality product is delivered.
How we can effectively utilize the QA function in an agile environment?
When with Developers – QA team can work closely with the developers in designing a quality product. The development could use test-driven approach and together they can work on creating the test cases for it. Another benefit possible is in conducting unit tests. At GodSpeed, for our internal development, we have a Dev QA assigned to each of our projects from the start. The QA is involved from the conceptualization stage and in everyday developments, and gains hands on experience on the game engines. Even before an issue goes on to a build, the dev QA highlights it to the team and it ends there for that issue.
Another interesting exercise in this approach is estimation. The QA members when actively participate in the product, they work towards arriving at realistic stories. And anticipate the creation of test scenarios and test cases which needs to be executed before passing a story.
QA members will also work with product owners in shaping the stories and in defining the exact requirements through smaller stories. The acceptance criteria is also defined for the features/functionality that has been completed.
We can see there are benefits of this approach in product development. However, in an organization structure there are always challenges for the implementation. The internal functional boundaries should be removed and collaboration between team should be increased.
Each of the departments can take certain steps to achieve success with the approach:
Product owners have to play a vital role, so that QA members can be viewed as integral part of the team and involve them in defining stories, planning and test executions.
Development team should understand the value QA brings on the table. They should not view them as just testers. They should encourage QA members to contribute from the initial planning stage till the delivery.
QA teams should be more flexible in following the processes, creating documentation and in reporting.
Sharing information and collaboration should be given priority by the QA team members. Training and developing individual skills will enable the QA members to fulfill further roles in the organization.
Following the above processes, QA could be easily be integrated into the development and thus transforming them from independent to integrated team members.