28 August, 2014

Agile QA Process for Projects - Best Practices

As an incremental and iterative agile approach for software development, scrum is used widely by enterprises across the world to manage product development in a holistic and flexible way. Scrum requires the development team to work as a single unit for accomplishing a common goal. The agile approach further assumes that the clients can always change their mind about their wants and needs during the project.

Therefore, it becomes essential for both software developers and testers to explore innovative ways to deliver valuable features of business in short development iterations varying from 2 to 4 weeks.
Thus, the traditional programming practices fail to complement agile QA process on scrum projects. The QA engineers also need to keep in mind several best practices to optimize the agile QA process on scrum projects.

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6 Best Practices for Implementing Agile QA process on Scrum Projects

1) Make the Team Member Understand the Customer Requirements
To make the agile QA process more effective, the team members involved in quick iterations must possess practical experience and expertise. The expertise and experience in practice will make it easier for the professional to reduce the customary delays and quicken the iteration. For instance, when a team member is representing a financial customer he must be familiar with the customer’s wants and requirements.

2) Use Specific Agile Terms and Examples
Several agile terms and examples must be used frequently to help the team in migrating to agile QA process. Some of the common terms associated with conventional project management needs to be replaced with specific agile terms and examples. For instance, user stories can replace terms like requirements, whereas term like Project Management Office has to be replaced with Agile Center of Excellence.

3) Co-locate the Team Members
To accomplish the desired QA results, it is important to allow team members to meet and interact with each other unabatedly. An organization can even consider co-locating the team of software developers in a single room to create the physical environment or ambience required for unrestricted collaboration. At the same time, the organization needs to use latest communication tools to facilitate smooth interaction between local and remote teams. It can even reorganize the office space to create the perfect physical environment for collaboration.

4) Identify the Measurable Results to be accomplished through Agile
To get the desired QA results, an organization must identify the measurable goals. Once the goals are identified, it will be easier for the organization to explain the project outcomes to the team members by preparing a vision statement. The vision statement will make it easier for software developers to write the predetermined code within a specific timeframe to deliver the valuable features of business.

5) Adjust the Oversight Requirements
The team also needs to adjust the oversight requirements through demonstrations that are both frequent and tangible. These tangible demonstrations will further make it easier for the business to gain the trust of both customers and reviewers. Also, the interaction with client will help businesses in avoiding additional oversight documents and databases.

6) Accelerate the Delivery of Business Features
As noted earlier, scrum approach assumes that the mind and requirements of the customer may change during production. So the members of the QA team must use the latest tools to track the modifications required by the client, and deliver the features on schedule. The developers can even refer to compliant development sites to comply with the security and architectural needs of the domain.

Coordination between the product owner, ScrumMaster and team members is also essential for smooth agile QA process on scrum projects. Instead of managing the team, the ScrumMaster aims to increase productive and creativity of team members by removing all impediments. So the ScrumMaster must identify and remove all hurdles to implement the agile QA process on scrum projects perfectly.

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