My two cents on how I have managed to do this in the past- 1. Quality starts with how well the team has understood the vision and how well the product manager and owner have broken down that vision into tangible user stories. 2. The stories themselves have to be detailed (ideally in the BDD format) so that the acceptance criteria is absolutely clear. 3. Productive and two-way refinement sessions where the dev/ test teams understand what needs to be developed and why. 4. In certain cases I have also discussed the ‘how’ in the refinement sessions, but do this only if you have a tech background. This does avoid last mile iterations within the sprint. 5. Test automation defintely goes a long way in cutting down overall testing time.

Here are a few strategies from my toolbox: - Defining test scenarios along-side requirements and defining test cases during software design. - Frequent checks during each iteration to ensure the design and implementation is in alignment with requirements and product vision. - Ensuring that the entire spectrum of product team has in-depth knowledge of the problem we are trying to solve and is performing their role with this awareness. This a good control measure to ensure quality and fit of the solution.

The first step is to have a healthy backlog which is groomed by the teams with clarity to requirements, and the teams have a good understanding of what is coming up in the iterations. The second step is to ensure teams are building on the stable platform or framework and avoid parallel transformation projects to platforms and frameworks used in the project. The third step is to have more cross functional test scenarios identified, more of exploratory and the team reserve a "break it day" type event, so all hands do some ad-hoc testing with hints from exploratory scenarios over and above planned testing activities. These above steps could lead to increments in the team velocity and gradually build momentum with desired outcomes.

Here is what I would suggest to maintain quality with faster iteration: - Having test scenarios designed and test cases created before or at initial stage of development and communicated, to ensure development is aligned to it and meeting those. - Building features with quality baked-in with higher unit testing coverage - Switching Peer-to-peer programming + testing, if there is time before moving to faster iteration - Componentize (small part) testing before end to end functional testing

Agile development, parallel testing, proper requirements gathering are all key. The two essentials though are: 1) open communication among all team members, especially between the development team and business, and 2) trust between all team members regardless of roles. Defects and bugs will happen - we're all human. These issues will be hidden or swept under the rug if there isn't trust. This only leads to longer term delays with development.