How do you balance quality requirements with time and budget constraints in agile?

2 Collaborate and communicate

Another key principle of agile is to foster collaboration and communication among the stakeholders, the development team, and the quality assurance team. This means that you need to involve and engage your stakeholders in defining, reviewing, and accepting your quality requirements. You can use techniques such as user personas, scenarios, story mapping, or prototyping to elicit and clarify your quality requirements with your stakeholders. You can also use tools such as product backlog, sprint backlog, or definition of done to communicate and align your quality requirements with your development team and quality assurance team. By collaborating and communicating your quality requirements, you can ensure that everyone is on the same page and that any issues or changes are addressed promptly and effectively.

3 Automate and integrate

A third key principle of agile is to embrace change and adapt to feedback. This means that you need to automate and integrate your quality requirements into your development and testing processes. You can use techniques such as test-driven development, behavior-driven development, or acceptance test-driven development to write your quality requirements as executable tests that drive your code design and implementation. You can also use tools such as continuous integration, continuous delivery, or continuous testing to automate and integrate your quality requirements into your build, deployment, and testing pipelines. By automating and integrating your quality requirements, you can reduce errors, defects, and rework, and ensure that your quality requirements are met and validated continuously and consistently.

4 Inspect and adapt

A fourth key principle of agile is to inspect and adapt based on the results and feedback. This means that you need to measure and monitor your quality requirements and their impact on your system or product. You can use techniques such as quality metrics, quality indicators, or quality audits to assess and evaluate your quality requirements and their achievement. You can also use tools such as dashboards, reports, or feedback loops to collect and analyze data and feedback on your quality requirements and their performance. By inspecting and adapting your quality requirements, you can identify and address any gaps, issues, or opportunities for improvement, and adjust your quality requirements accordingly.

5 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?