SCRUM and Testing

 

At the time of writing I've a fair few years of working in a SCRUM environment under my belt and have been involved in 2 transitions from traditional approaches to SCRUM. The first I was heavily involved in having completed the PSM1 training and leading a newly formed SCRUM team into the unknown. At this time I was duel rolling as SCRUM master and QA engineer. AS well as setting up the team to follow the SCRUM style SDLC and flows I used my newly found servant leader "power" to bring quality front and centre and build it into the way we as a team delivered software. Additionally we used metrics such as release cycle times and ticket time in status to hone in on where our bottlenecks existed so we could target these areas to deliver software quicker. These will be explored in later posts.

You might have looked at the Scrum Guide and be thinking, hey, there's no mention of QA. That's because SCRUM is largely agnostic. You'll see the development team mentioned and this is where QA engineers reside. The development team is a cross functional team which has all the necessary ingredients to deliver working software be it design, programmers, QA engineers, devops etc. We are now in the realm of discipline synergy. Cross discipline interactions are combined with a process that enables short feedback loops to create a combined effect greater than the sum of the separate effects. Everyones opinion matters. This allows us to deliver better solutions faster. And as a team to continuously improve on our solutions and how we deliver them.

It's in this development team that we as QA engineers use our knowledge to help the team perform safely and efficiently. Have a look at my introductory page to QA and Scrum here and see where you fit in in your typical SCRUM team.