How do you use agile or DevOps for enterprise software QA?

It is disheartening to see other responses emphasising QA and dev silos within an agile team. (Including having separate story point estimations for testing, which is the most destructive idea I've heard so far!) Testing should be a shared responsibility for every team member, with the testing specialist focused on quality coaching rather than their own tests. If developers don't know much about testing, pair with them and raise the testing knowledge and ability of the entire team.

As per my previous organisation experience, i strongly believe an agile process helps QA to understand the life cycle of Software Development to Application Deliver to Stakeholder. It involves QA in each phase of the life cycle of an application starting from requirement gathering, sprint planning, scrum meetings, brainstorming sessions and retrospective sessions. To release a quality product, the QA must undergo all these processes. So agile plays an important role from a QA point of view.

Enterprise software is crucial and demands top-quality assurance for reliability, security, and performance. Many teams now use Agile and DevOps methodologies, integrating testing throughout development. This enhances collaboration and feedback but requires adaptability in a fast-paced environment.

Working within the structures of agile can at times be challenging for QA, especially when a team only has one or two dedicated QA people. Often QA story point estimates can differ greatly from dev estimates for a particular story, since the work is often disproportionate. QA is often left with little time to complete testing within a sprint, especially if there are delays in completing work on the dev side. In some ways, QA often has to work "out of band" from the rest of the development team to complete their work effectively.

One thing I've had some success with is having QA make separate story point estimates from the developers during sprint planning. It can take some effort to convince stakeholders that this approach is useful, but there are times when a seemingly minor dev change can require large amounts of regression testing or major changes from the dev side are already well covered by existing automation. If a story does require a significant amount of effort from QA, sometimes it works well to have QA drive the story to completion. This only really works well on white box teams with good dev/QA collaboration, but if you have that you'll generally have a lot less other issues in the long run.

For Agile QA, integrate testing early in the development cycle. Emphasize collaboration between QA and developers, ensuring continuous feedback. Automate repetitive tasks and conduct frequent regression testing. Prioritize test cases based on business value and risk. In DevOps QA, align testing with continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. Automate end-to-end testing for faster feedback. Foster a culture of collaboration between development and operations teams. Implement robust monitoring and feedback mechanisms for rapid issue resolution. Continuously refine processes based on real-time insights. Embrace a shift-left approach, addressing quality from the initial stages of development.