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The key to a successful adoption of any software development methodology is a clear understanding of the roles and responsibilities of each team member within that framework. As Agile continues its rapid adoption in organizations across the globe, it’s essential to define the role of QA in Scrum as concretely as we’ve defined the other Scrum Team roles.
During our team’s recent Agile transition, I was approached from all corners of the organization, with questions like, “What does QA do every day in the sprint? What are their responsibilities beyond testing and reporting defects? What should they do in the early part of the sprint, when there’s no software to test yet?” Despite being a recent “graduate” of several Agile methodology courses, I found myself ill-equipped to answer these questions. There isn’t much information in the trainings or on the web about the role of QA in the Scrum team. What little I have found is primarily anecdotal, rarely specific, and never comprehensive. While Product Owner and Scrum Master roles are very well defined, QA Engineers fall under the generic label, “Team Member." We were on our own to define the role of QA.
What we quickly learned delighted us: Agile methodology, with its fundamental shift away from waterfall software development, gives QA an opportunity for broader and deeper involvement in the overall software development lifecycle. This enables us better to ensure quality — not by finding and reporting defects — but by preventing the introduction of defects in the first place.
This talk provides a deep dive into the specific, day to day role of QA in Scrum, as our team developed it through the course of a yearlong transition to Agile. You will learn specific responsibilities and activities you can bring to your teams to transcend the traditional test-and-report, after-the-fact approach to quality assurance. And you will learn to leverage the unique components of Agile to significantly expand your scope of influence, and measurably improve the quality of your software.
Speaker : Karen Ascheim Wysopal is a Section Manager in Software Quality at Hewlett-Packard. She currently leads the Quality Assurance program for HPConnected.com, ePrintcenter.com, and related HP web-connected printer technologies. With over 20 years in the software QA industry, Karen’s professional passions are building high functioning innovative QA teams from the ground up, defining new processes, and expanding QA focus on the user experience. She can’t seem to stop breaking software. |
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The key to successful adoption of any development methodology is a clear understanding of the roles and responsibilities of each team member within that framework. As agile continues its rapid adoption, it’s essential to define the role of QA in Scrum as concretely as we’ve defined the other team roles.
Agile methodology gives QA an opportunity for broader and deeper involvement in the software development lifecycle, enabling us more effectively to ensure quality, not by finding defects, but by preventing the introduction of defects in the first place. Because quality starts with the user story, QA can drive defect prevention by asking key questions of product owners during requirements definition. We can ensure that comprehensive acceptance criteria are in place, to drive high quality development, testing, and story acceptance. We can also ask technical questions of developers. This results in more thoroughly defined user stories and prompts developers to consider additional issues, and avoid pitfalls in advance of implementation. Finally, to prevent the steady growth of technical debt, we must remind scrum masters to plan story points for fixing both known and unknown defects as part of every sprint. This presentation will teach you how to leverage Agile within your organization to see immediate improvements in the quality of your software delivery.
About the speaker...
Karen Ascheim Wysopal has been in software QA for over 20 years, in roles including tester, release manager, software engineer, test automation engineer, and 8 years as QA manager. She’s spent the past five years at Hewlett Packard, and currently heads Quality & PMO in the Software and Web Services organization, overseeing HPConnected.com, ePrintcenter.com, and related HP web-connected print technologies. She was a leader in the organization’s transition to Agile last year. Karen has presented at the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference. Her professional passions are building high functioning innovative teams from the ground up, defining processes that encompass a holistic approach to quality, and speaking on best practices to foster improvements across the industry. She can’t seem to stop breaking software. |