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Agile Teams Require Agile QA: How we made it work.

Thu, 2008-02-21 23:27 — Kealy Opelt, Tracy Beeson
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room: Conference E, M — time: Thursday 08:30-10:00
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It is challenging to successfully integrate QA within the agile process. Not only is expanding the XP process to include other disciplines difficult but XP teams typically reject traditional QA practices. Integrating QA into your XP team does not have to be painful. It can be achieved by building an agile QA process through tackling small goals using the XP principles.

Process/Mechanics

This session will run as a presentation outlining the steps needed to create QA in an Agile environment, by sharing what we have a accomplished in our organization.

  1. Recognize that quality assurance is needed in an eXtreme programming environment. (See attached RecognizeQAisNeeded.pdf)
    • Unit tests do not replace QA (See attached UnderstandQArole.pdf)
    • Seek team and customer buy-in
  2. Understand the Role of QA
  3. What we have seen happen when no one is directly responsible for QA
    • Can developers do QA?
    • Can the High Tech Anthropologists (HTATM) do QA?
    • What if we make the client responsible for QA?
  4. Start Simple
    • Listen and learn
      • Ask lots of questions
      • Attend meetings
      • Talk to the team
    • Learn about the customer’s needs
      • Attend the planning game
    • Go bug hunting
      • Use exploratory testing
      • Write bug cards
    • Write QA task cards
  5. Add QA into the XP process
    • Participate in the iteration kick-off meetings
      • Tell the team what’s in store for QA this iteration
    • Help customer prioritize bugs
      • Create a bug board (See attached BugBoard.pdf)
      • Incorporate bugs into the planning game
    • Participate in green dotting process
      • What is green dotting?
      • Who green dots a card?
    • Formalize verifying the build
      • Create high-level checklist of items to test
      • Test all cards that had work done from the iteration
    • Iterate the QA process
      • Change what doesn’t work
      • Try something new
  6. Incorporate more formalized QA testing
    • Build a regression test suite
      • FitNesse as an example
  7. Lessons Learned / What will we try next?
  8. Conclusion