How to handle QA and testing in a scrum environment?

Question

I work for a web development agency, and we are using the scrum model.

The way it is applied may not be the best. We use grooming sessions, work in complexity points, but in the end, the project was still sold in dollars.

Unfortunately, in order to stay "on target" on a tight budget, we often end up cutting QA short (we do not have a department for that).

There is currently no automated testing, as it would take a lot of time to create them on the framework we are using.

So my question: how do you make QA, and the bug fixes that come with it, work well in scrum?

Answer 1

Scrum requires that the team creates a potentially shippable product at the end of every sprint. This means that all testing needed to release code to production for an item must be done before you can say the item is done. In other words, no partial credit for Dev-Done.

There are many reasons Scrum encourages, but suffice to say that if you are not creating potentially shippable increments each sprint, you are pulling out a critical part of Scrum and you will lose key pieces of value that it provides.

Now, many teams can't jump right to this and they shouldn't give up on Scrum. They should acknowledge that they are creating a deficiency - they are creating technical debt - that they will have to pay down sometime (bugs don't go away just because you aren't testing for them) and they should be continuously improving toward a way of working that allows for a potentially shippable product every sprint.

Answer 2

Since scrum need effective collaboration between people and process, here are a few things that can be done to improve the QA outcomes:

Define requirements on what must be tested and where it must be tested

The scrum team must pursue an efficient approach to testing

The scrum team must consider thinking like a product-owner for effective decision-making

Since scrum environment runs on collaborative efforts, the opinion of developers, testers, business analysts, etc. Must be gathered.

The product owners must be involved throughout the process with developers to have different perspectives.

Answer 3

Here are some points you can take care of:

1. Plan everything including QA activities in Sprint Planning Meeting.
2. Take estimates from QA and add them into final estimates of Sprint.
3. Only commit work which you and your team can perform in this sprint.

I worked in an Agile team and we worked like this; a. In start of sprint, dev would start their development and when ever its ready, it is in QA. b. QA will start test and add bugs as they come, Highest priority and critical bug will be takn first and solved.

Try following this and by practicing you will do better. Good luck.