When does strict adherence to requirements win over the agile approach and flexibility?

-

 I see that part of the power of agile is being able to change requirements during an iteration and still release, there is flexibility inherent in the process. From a project management and development perspective, that sounds good, but through the eyes of a QA person, it has the very real danger of letting things slip through the cracks.

With that in mind, can there be a line drawn between letting the agility of changing functionality allow a product to change mid-sprint and the steadfast necesity of real, measurable, requirements? And if so, then where can that line be put? I see the benefits of both and am wondering whether the ‘grey area’ in the middle can be clarified?


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Agile v Waterfall - Which Is The More Risky?

-
  I still find it strange that companies unfamiliar with Agile automatically view it as being a methodology that pays no heed to process or ensuring quality of output. From my experience the quality is actually a lot better, the timescales set are achieved more readily and everyone involved has a much greater understanding of the product and its development status at any one time. At present I´m working on a project where I´ve had to split the test team into two due to several companies working to build a complex product together. One team is performing agile QA in a sprint team, the other is working ´the old way´. It´s very interesting to note that all the worry and uncertainty is coming from the team working with the traditional model due to the fact that timeframes having been guesstimated months ago about environments, data and functionality that no-one knew about then. As time marches on we appear to be spending more time in meetings discussing what we once thought was gospel,...
Read more

What are the Educational Requirements and How to train for the job of Quality Assurance?

-
  The position of a quality assurance job requires a certain set of educational qualifications which would help the professional to carry out the technical and administrative operations given to him as part of his job role in the organization. Following are the educational requirements to obtain a post in the quality assurance job field: Educational Requirements: The minimum educational requirement to enter into the field of quality assurance is a bachelor’s degree in the field of computer science any other related field. This study must include subjects of Java, C++, and Python etc. A further master’s degree in the field of business administration majoring in any of the related subjects would prove beneficial in acquiring a post in the quality assurance job. However, the educational requirements differ with industry. Like for example, a candidate who wants to work in the quality assurance department in the aviation industry would require a high school diploma combined with an aero...
Read more

To Assume is To Doubt - Eliminating Doubt to Ensure Quality

-
To Assume is To Doubt - Eliminating Doubt to Ensure Quality  Recently I was reflecting on the many different occasions on projects where I’d witnessed assumptions being made regarding test and project strategies as an acceptable practice. Situations such as the following :- 1) Maintaining test environments with unmonitored and, as a result, unknown and unrepeatable data, under the assumption that it is the functionality of the application that is important and the data it is fed is immaterial. 2) Testing end user sessions on a different platform, under the assumption that there will be very little difference in functionality (”Firefox on Ubuntu is the same as on Windows”) 3) Pointing new-starters to a wiki-page, under the assumption that anything else they need to know shall be relayed by ‘asking around’ 4) Arranging development teams such that each person only has deep understanding of one part of the system, under the assumption that all issues that arise will be easily solved by...
Read more