by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory

When a tester joins an agile team, she leaves her Test or QA team behind. Often, her old QA team is disbanded altogether. Without the support of a QA team, she might feel abandoned, especially if she now reports to a development manager. She’s in danger of becoming isolated, having lost the phased and gated process that guided her old team. She may feel pushed to the sidelines and like she’s lost any control over quality.

Does Quality Management, as depicted in Figure 1.0, have a place in agile product (system-software) development and delivery?

Written by Bob Small and Janet Gregory

Janet Gregory has been a long time icon of mine.  When I was asked to write an article for the Agile Journal regarding Agile testing I was honoured.  The first person I thought of was Janet Gregory and Lisa Crispin as their book, Agile Testing, was a huge help to me when I was first learning about this topic.  After contacting Janet about co-authoring the article, we quickly discovered that we had a very strong difference of opinion.  We decided to share that with you in this article.  You may feel strongly one way or another from reading this article, and the comments from the conversation, but please remember we are all trying to do the same thing.  Increase quality, of our software, and help others to do the same.

Most sprint planning meetings I have attended were fun. The ones that weren’t involved a poorly groomed product backlog, whose high-priority items were not workable, not ready to be pulled into the sprint. When the backlog hasn’t been prepared prior to the meeting, the product owner and team often carry out impromptu grooming activities. These consume valuable planning time and usually result in poor requirements and weak commitments. Plus, everyone is fed up and exhausted by the end of the meeting. As a consequence, the product backlog items that are likely to be worked on in the next sprint have to be prepared prior to each sprint planning meeting. Although it is the product owner’s job to make sure that the work gets done, preparing the product backlog should be teamwork involving the product owner, ScrumMaster and team. We begin the preparation work by choosing a sprint goal.

During these challenging economic times there is a dramatic increase in the need of organizations to adapt the software delivery lifecycle processes to the rapid changes often imposed on them. Leadership is making the decision to transition its development organization – not than just small teams but large numbers of engineers, working on a broad portfolio of development projects from many different locations around the world — to a more agile approach as part of an effort to vastly improve performance, be more responsive to customers and improve quality. However, there are many challenges that an established software organization faces when shifting to Agile.