“Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.” – Stephen Hawking
In today’s fast-paced world, the implementation also should be swift. This is applicable to all kinds of products and services. In this blog, we are going to see a brief about Scrum and Agile in testing and how it helps to achieve faster delivery of the products/services.
What is Scrum?
Scrum is a lightweight with an incredibly powerful set of values, principles, and practices.
Scrum refers to a lightweight framework being used in every industry to deliver complex, innovative products, and services that truly delight customers. It is basic to understand but proves to be difficult to master.
Difference between Scrum and Agile in Testing
The key difference between scrum and agile in testing is that agile cites a set of principles and values shared by various methodologies, processes, and practices. Scrum is a framework for implementing agile in the development process.
Scrum transforms the standard approach to project management and team building. In the process, costs and working hours are drastically cut, leading to reported improvements in productivity of a staggering 400–800%.
Agile delivers the software on a regular basis for feedback while Scrum delivers the product or project after each sprint.
Scrum team consists of 3 specific roles:
- Product Owner
- Scrum Master
- Software Development team
The development team includes developers, designers, and testers.
Role of Scrum Master in Scrum
In general, scrum master will be a Certified Scrum Master from Scrum Alliance and he will act as a servant leader. In simple words, he will act as a facilitator to run the product/project smoothly. The major responsibilities of the Scrum Master will be:
- Leading and coaching the scrum team for its adoption of the scrum.
- Understand and enact Scrum and pragmatic product development.
- Make everyone in the scrum team to understand the objectives, goals.
- Effective backlog management.
- Facilitate all the scrum meetings.
- Guides towards continuous improvement.
- Working with the team to increase the effectiveness of the application of Scrum.
Role of QA in Scrum
In traditional testing, the tester will get the build at the end of the development cycle after completion of the development of the product. But in Scrum, the QA has to do the testing throughout the process. The role of QA in Scrum will be:
- Adhere to SDLC early and throughout the process.
- Attend the Stand-up, Sprint Planning, and Sprint Retrospective meetings.
- Understand the business knowledge.
- Adopt and learn automation to reduce testing time.
- Learn about Project Management tools
Can Scrum Master be a QA or QA be a Scrum Master?
This is a myth that a scrum master can be responsible for QA in the scrum, likewise, the QA can play a role as a scrum master along with testing.
Scrum Master facilitates the meetings and the collaborator between the team members. Also, he or she guides the team toward continuous improvement—to ask with regularity, “How can we do what we do better?”
The focus of QA will be more on ensuring the quality of the project or product. QA will be identifying the requirement gaps, bugs found, and report those to the scrum master. QA has to conduct testing not only on the completion of individual tasks of the project but need to be continued along with the entire development. The scrum master has to effectively look into the reports given by QA and take the necessary steps to resolve that.
QA plays a vital role in the scrum and it can’t be replaced by the scrum master. Similarly, QA can’t replace the role of a scrum master. The most preferable and successful strategy is both the QA and Scrum Master has to work more closely to ensure the great quality of the product/project delivery.
Handy Tips for The Best Scrum Team
Scrum provides a framework for the organization to work towards a common goal. Scrum is built to scale. As per eff Sutherland Co-Creator of Scrum, The third leg of the stool for great teams is that they have all the skills necessary to get things done.
One of the major concepts in Scrum is that the team members will come up and tell how they’re going to do the work. It is an organization’s leadership is to set the strategic goals, but it’s in the team’s hands to decide how to reach those goals.
The below picture shows the excerpts of the key takeaways from the book “The art of doing twice the work in half the time” chapter Teams about the team:
Pull the Right Lever: Change Team performance. This has much more impact by several orders of magnitude than individual any performance.
Transcendence: Awesome teams have a purpose that is greater than the individual;
Autonomy: When a team has the freedom to make decisions on how to proceed to be respected as masters of their craft. Autonomy will make a difference and will make a rebellion in whatever they do.
Cross-functional: In small organizations, the scrum team wears multiple hats. The team must have every skill needed to achieve the goal of whether the mission is to deliver Salesforce.com software or capture terrorists in Iraq.
Small Wins: Small teams make wonders and complete the work faster than a big team. The thumb rule is seven team members with plus or minus two. As a team, we should not pinpoint the issues/personalities. The win is based on how the team is addressing and finding a resolution as a team.
This gives you a brief about Scrum and Agile in testing and how it helps to achieve faster delivery of the products/services
Happy Learning!! Happy Testing!!
