Agility in QA Mindset is a key to success in the era of Agile.

Whenever it comes to Agile software development methodology there are few Manifesto and Principals that comes to mind.

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As we can see Agile completely believes in “Customer Satisfaction, feedback loop, team collaboration, quick delivery, embracing change request, etc..”. The intent behind coming up with Agile looks quite interesting isn't it?

Let’s talk more from QA standpoint. As we know traditionally in Waterfall model of Software development workflow would typically look like this.

Wherein requirement would be frozen during the initial phase followed by which Development of software would begin. Hence Software testing life-cycle will be typically look like this

So a QA would typically follow below workflow.

Requirement understanding -> Brainstorming -> Writing Test Scenario -> Writing Test Cases -> Verification -> Re-Testing of defect ( if any )

Above workflow make sense in the world of Waterfall model. However, with high Agile acceptance in the industry, a shift from Waterfall to Agile Mindset is required.

In case of Agile more of Shift-Left testing is embraced. The entire team is highly involved right from Requirement Understanding phase to Delivery/Maintenance phase. So the bifurcation between Software Developer and QA is not there in a team which truly follows Agile.

The entire team works together towards defect prevention rather than finding them during the verification phase.

Let’s talk more from Ground 0 now.

During the Grooming phase, Dev-QA does pairing with each other and come up with there set of understanding and discuss among themselves around the requirement. Once brainstorming is done a list of Open questions are posted to the client for clarification around the same.

Post Grooming the Sprint planning phase kicks in wherein based on the answers given by the client, the team have better visibility around the requirement hence realistic estimates are given for the User Stories inclusive of Dev/QA/BA pairing.

Post Planning Sprint begging and QA starts with writing Test Scenarios/Cases activity. During the course of documentation QA and Developer team collaborates with each other to ensure they are on the same page. In case of any scenarios that was missed by either of the team, they take care of the same during the Coding/Documentation phase itself. It help is eliminating the late defect cost.

Once Developer is done with Coding and is about to get started with dev testing, then a QA member pairs up with Developer to ensure things are working as expected at a high level.

Once the Code is ready and is deployed to QA environment, QA starts with the end to end verification of the story. Hence the possibility of discovering a defect decreases exponentially.

During the Waterfall model, QA used to get appreciated based on the number of defects that were found during the verification phase. As a result, somehow teams use to work in a silo. Which would result in the change of entire code base sometimes architecture itself as a result cost of Project would go up significantly as described in the below image.

However, in the case of a team which follows Agile truly, a Developer/QA gets appreciation based on Minimal code changes and less number of defects found.

Bringing it all together

There is high acceptance of Shift-left testing in Industry because of the amount of benefit it has brought in terms of effort saving for rework. Hence a shift in Agile QA mindset is required to ensure high throughput from a team.

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