What’s Driving YOU to Better Testing? Consider the Story of Amy and Morgan.
Very interesting comments made by Jean Tabaka. I don’t think that there is an Agile team in existence that has not been guilty of ‘hiding’ defects at the end of the sprint by adding them as a backlog item. Reading Tabaka’s blog post, and having worked on iterative and agile projects, I see where there is a need to focus on the testing phase. Since I have been working in Agile teams; I have been very conscious of not applying ‘quality gates’ or too much process. I have bought in to the collaborative model and the need for self-organisation.
But as time goes on, and reading such a viewpoint, it is also important to keep to the other objectives of agile; specifically that at the end of a sprint, you have a shippable product. Pushing testing earlier in the sprint, working with developers to provide feedback is one thing. Not acting on this feedback, adds pressure to the team towards the end of the sprint as you have a bottleneck of bugs that need to be addressed to get to ‘Done’.
I’ll certainly be looking hard at what can be changed during the sprint cycle, by applying more focus on testing (QA) to minimise the bottleneck of bugs, that cause issue at the end of sprint, so that we avoid the build up of technical backlog in the form of outstanding defects.
There will always be feedback during the sprint that is clearly a ‘missed’ requirement or a logical enhancement to a story; this is the beauty of agile, and these items quite rightly are added to the backlog to be prioritised by the Product owner. But as the linked blog suggests teams do need to avoid adding to future pain and get it right first time. Committing to a sprint is exactly that, and all members of the team have to remember that they are responsible for the process and the quality of the deliverable.
Objects of Distraction 