QA, Quality & SPeed
Intermediate
difficulty
Stage 3
Agile IQ® Level
Quality
Practices
Scrum
Framework
Introduction
As early as the 1950s, Deming argued that downstream gates for assessing quality don’t build-in quality. They only identify what re-work is needed.
Rework Slows Delivery
QA’s need for teams to attend to the errors they find force people into rework-mode.
- Team members spend time fixing errors.
- Focus is taken away from delivery.
- Delivery slows.
In this model, no time is spent on learning why the errors occur in the first place and what actions are needed to ensure the errors don’t happen again. This is why Deming argued that quality should, instead, be “built-in” at every step.
Define Quality
Scrum teams define quality in their Definition of Done. This list outlines all of the activities, standards and constraints that downstream QA teams would investigate and asks the team to:
- Plan how they will deliver work according to the Definition of Done.
- Release work when it meets the Definition of Done.
- Elicit feedback from work by demonstrating it meets the Definition of Done to stakeholders.
- Take feedback from errors and lapses in quality, including from its use, and ascertain how to improve the Definition of Done in a Retrospective potentially in each and every Sprint (not at the end of the project).
What should be in your Definition of Done?
A team’s Definition of Done should be taken from its organisations rules, policies and processes, including:
- Auditing requirements.
- Security standards.
- Compliance standards.
- Industry standards.
- Customer expectations of quality.
- Coding and testing standards, if it’s a software team.
Some examples include:
Embed QA talent in the team
Agile teams are cross-functional, designed to operate as a single delivery unit. Where they rely on external teams, such as a specialist QA team, these handovers create delays in the delivery of value.
When designing teams, consider the skills needed to create quality and whether putting people with QA skills into the team is an important step to removing handovers and improving quality.
Expect time savings
Building-in quality takes time. After a few months, expect the following impacts:
- Less time spent fixing errors from QA.
- Quality should improve within a few months.
- Time to deliver the same work should now be quicker.
- Less time to deliver the same work means reduced operational costs.
- Time savings mean the team can deliver more work.
- Productivity should increase within a few months.
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