Your team values speed over thorough testing. How do you ensure quality isn't compromised?

Agile methods are a set of principles for software development that prioritize flexibility, collaboration, and customer feedback. They emphasize delivering small, incremental improvements through iterative cycles, known as sprints, rather than waiting for a final product. Agile encourages frequent communication among team members and stakeholders, allowing for quick adjustments based on evolving requirements. This approach helps teams adapt to changes more easily and ensures that the software meets the user’s needs effectively.

Ensure that products and services meet established standards of quality, reliability, and performance. Their key responsibilities include designing and implementing tests, identifying and documenting defects, and collaborating with development teams to resolve issues. QA professionals use a variety of testing techniques, such as manual and automated testing, to scrutinize software, systems, and processes. They play a crucial role in maintaining customer satisfaction and regulatory compliance by preventing defects and ensuring that products function correctly before release. Strong analytical skills, attention to detail, and a thorough understanding of testing methodologies are essential for success in this role.

To balance speed with thorough testing, integrate quality gates into your Agile process. Define clear quality metrics like code coverage and performance benchmarks that must be met before advancing features. Implement automated tools to enforce these metrics within your CI/CD pipeline. Incorporate incremental testing approaches such as Test-Driven Development (TDD) and Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) to ensure continuous validation of new features. Foster regular feedback loops through Agile retrospectives to address quality issues promptly. Prioritize testing based on risk to focus on critical areas, ensuring quality isn't compromised despite the emphasis on speed.

Automation tools plays an important role in speed up the test with maintaining quality also. By Automation, we can save a lots of time in Regression Testing that save time for the test areas where manual is required. That will ensure quality with time.

In my experience, Risk Prioritization is an important areas while testing the test objects. This is something like 80/20 ratio i.e 80 percent of the issues are linked with 20 percent of the concern areas and we need to prioritize that areas smartly so that our 80 percent concerns will be automatically resolved.

In test development life cycle, continuous feedback is very important that not helps in running test but also provide us the important informations that is useful for maintaining quality in future projects.

What I can say is that about software testing is that "Uncertainity" is there as the test process is highly depended on the nature of the project/product. For that continuous learning and training plays an important role to make the team on track and helpful during the test design for ensuring the quality product.

Delivering with speed vs delivering with quality has been usually treated as a trade-off rather than one whole package. There are two key aspects that can give us speed and quality as a package: 1. Quality Processes: SDLC is filled with numerous processes, especially those that allow better dev-QA collaboration. The focus should be to continuously introspect these processes. 2. Robust automation: Whether we talk unit, integration, system, or acceptance tests. Test automation doesn't do trade-offs, and improves speed and quality in parallel.