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YDS: Where Does Quality Assurance (QA) Fit on a Scrum Team? - read the full article about Quality Assurance 2021, QA Testing and Quality assurance from Agile for Humans on Qualified.One
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(upbeat music) - All right.
Welcome to todays episode of Your Daily Scrum.
That guy over there is professional Scrum trainer, Todd Miller.
He should be first today.
Who am I? - Ryan Ripley.
Actually, @RyanRipley.
- Oh yeah, thats my Twitter handle, right? - Yeah.
- Did we ever get you a new Twitter handle? - It should be champagne Miller. - No.
There was a couple that people left in the comments and I wasnt digging any of them.
Theres no, its gotta be better.
So if theres a better Twitter handle than Todd_Miller11 that you can think of.
- Comments.
- Yeah.
And you might just get a book in the mail.
- Yeah, Todd will ship you a book if you come up with a Twitter handle that...
actually Ill probably end up shipping you a book.
(laughing) But well get you a book, if you come up with a better Twitter handle, but Todd we better get to the question today.
- Lets do it, yep.
Where does QA fit on a Scrum team? - Yeah, and this is a question I...
Can I be honest about this question right here? - Please.
- I thought that I answered this five or six years ago.
- Did you? - Maybe more.
Cause this was a huge topic of discussion when I felt like Scrum was coming into mainstream.
Cause I feel like there was separate development departments and separate QA departments.
But what Im coming to find out is there still exists a lot.
It still exists a lot in organizations as separate departments for stuff, so.
- Yeah, its pretty wild that were still working in a setup where developers can just throw stuff over a wall to a separate team and not actually suffer the consequences of their own work.
- (laughs) Thats true.
- That model just drives me nuts.
And so if you were to ask me where does QA fit on a Scrum team? QA is right next to a developer pair programming on an activity, creating capabilities together, right? Theyre a full fledged member of a Scrum team.
They are one of the many developers who help a team create increments of useful, valuable, awesome product.
And I dont see them any better, different or worse than a programmer, a business analyst, an engineer, an expert.
They are a another crucial piece of the puzzle thats involved in getting this thing called an increment, shipped out the door.
- Yeah, they develop stuff, right? They develop test cases.
- Yeah, they help write the testing framework.
They help make sure that data integrity is maintained.
They make sure that were not getting in trouble from a bug or definition of done perspective.
But I love pairing up programmers and QA people and have them work together on building capabilities.
It teaches some coding skills to the QA expert.
Look, most of the QA people that I know, Todd, they think a little differently.
They actually get some delight and joy in breaking our stuff.
- Yeah. - Right? And so the more that a developer can learn how they think, the more defensively the programmer can program.
I mean, its just all around great learning, its transparency, its whole team understanding.
The more collaborative all of these different roles work together, I think the better we are as a team.
- Yeah, and you know, the one argument I often get is that, "Well, QA work lags behind that of coders." Right, and so to me, although that might be partially true, you can get ahead of that lag by, like you said, working with and pairing with a coder.
You can get ahead of that by having your test cases explicitly defined as the sprint goes on, you can get ahead of that if you bring your point of view into a retrospective so that coders cant just be working on something without checking it in and putting it in an environment very quickly.
- Right? - Right.
- So I think that bringing that lens that a tester has into all facets of how the Scrum team might change their process, really makes it important to the quality of the product.
Because theres one thing that I dont think we can say enough, right? There is nowhere in Scrum that says that youre going to gain a ton of speed, right? The idea is to build with quality and purpose, and to build valuable stuff.
And you cant really do that if your quality sucks.
- I mean, you cant bake it in at the end, (mumbles) it just doesnt work.
And so, if youre a team, especially if youre on a team where right now, a lot of your time is spent on bugs that are coming in and defects that are coming in.
And if youre having to hold back capacity, I think weve talked about that in a past video, having to hold back some capacity because these things, these escaped defects, keep coming back.
Guess what a QA person or two working collaboratively with a Scrum team, on the Scrum team, full fledged members can do in that situation, right? They can actually analyze the defects coming in.
They can suggest ways to permanently solve them.
They can help get us out of those horrible situations.
So if youre treating QA as an afterthought.
If youre treating QA as a group that we just throw things over the fence to.
If youre not treating them as a full fledged developer and a full fledged member on a Scrum team, I think youre missing a lot of opportunity to get some really high quality work to customers sooner.
- Yeah and I think just kinda icing on the cake here.
Theres was a lot of people that asked this question.
So, we do our best to give recognition out there but theres a lot of people that asks and were finding themes and questions and adding them to our product by going.
So thank you for this question.
I think Im a bit remissed in thinking that we solved this a bunch of years ago, I apologize.
Im glad and hopefully this video helps, right.
- [Ryan] Yeah, so be sure to leave your questions below in the comments section.
Who knows, maybe one of your questions will turn into a video in the future.
Check out our socials, right.
Its agileforhumans on most platforms.
Smash that like and subscribe button.
Right, Todd? - [Tod] Right, yeah, I was trying to think of something cool to say.
- [Ryan] Well, you missed that opportunity.
- [Todd] Shit. (laughing) So smash just subscribe and like button.
Make sure that, you know the next time we drop a another video.
Weve got plenty of new things coming along.
Fixing your combine, fixing your Scrum, your daily Scrum.
Maybe a few other, maybe well fire up craft brute agile here in the future.
Lots of things coming make sure- - [Tod] Oh yeah. - [Ryan] There we go.
- [Tod] So drink some milk Miller Highlife.
Theres some champagne, beer. - [Ryan] Champagne.
All right.
I think well wrap this one up.
Thanks for being here, thanks for listening, thanks for sharing.
We will catch you tomorrow on tomorrows edition of your Daily Scrum.
Have a great day.
Agile for Humans: YDS: Where Does Quality Assurance (QA) Fit on a Scrum Team? - QA Testing