Significance of QUALITY in the midst of ALC(Agile Life Cycle)

Vinaykumar VijinigiriQA - Tech Lead

Fiserv.

AbstractThis is a case study article for the companies who want to adopt Agile Life Cycle in the place of existing processes. In this, to showcase the greater value of QUALITY in-spite of many challenges and hurdles while implementing an agile process. It can be explained in detailed in upcoming sections with an example.

CASESummary of the case: - Emerging the Agile Development Life Cycle in the place of Water Fall process.

BACK GROUNDFormed DT (delivery team) – 5 (3:2) members (Combination of DEV & QA – though, not allowed to call separately. Please bear us as this article is going to be witnessed the importance of Quality.

CEREMONIES & ACTIVITIES (SPRINT) Story grooming

Planning & Estimations

Scrum meetings on daily basis

Developing and delivering the stories

Retrospective

Sprint time 10 Days

Committed for SIX stories

Case Execution

Visualize

Analysis

After analyzing the above workflow, story S6 could not complete at the end of the sprint. Here, it is very clear that, developer cannot have bandwidth in involving testing and similarly tester cannot involve in coding because they have their own primary tasks.

In this situation, if the DT members are planning to complete all six stories in order to meet organization expectation OR deliver to the market then there is a chance of compromising in QUALITY which will lead product rebound. Hence again same amount of effort required to meet all quality standards.

Conclusion & Recommendation

The combination of delivery team should have both DEV. and QA. Not just with DEV. or QA. Developer can do a testing and Tester can do a coding. However, they are good in their own primarily expertise areas. If tester has done the code OR If developer has done the testing by saying business demands or absence of any of the resources then the delivery team would be ready to face the consequences of this decision. Because, the perception of resource plays a predominant role while doing other tasks where he/she would not expertise/confidence. It is proven in many times. Hence the capacity of a delivery teams should be measured by number of stories certified by QA (that would be the actual deliverables from DT teams) rather number of CODE completion stories.As per above example, delivery team could not complete committed SIX stories due to more bugs which was not expected and estimated. Hence their capacity of the team can delivery only FIVE stories and spill over story will be moved to next sprint based on priority. It is a lesson learnt for teams to estimate for upcoming sprint. In other words, could also say that, if developer is not good in coding/less experienced/lack of product knowledge then every 2 developers required – 3 testers due to multiple test runs performed on each story.

Author Biography

Vinaykumar having 10+ Years of experience in Software Testing. Currently working as Quality Assurance Analyst Tech Lead in Electronic Payments with

responsibility of DWH, DB, Report and SOAP API testing Holds Master’s Degree in Information Technology. ISTQB Certified Tester.