QA Role in Agile

As we all know, the Role of QA is very indispensable in any software development process. QA monitors the entire software processes and methods used to assure quality.

The agile methodology gives QA engineers an opportunity for broader and deeper involvement in the overall software development life cycle.

There are various roles and responsibilities of QA in the Agile method thus, Firstly we comprehend quickly “what is the role of agile methodology when it comes to the software development process?”

Agile is a time-boxed, iterative approach to software delivery that builds software incrementally from the start of the project, instead of trying to deliver it all at once near the end. It works by breaking projects down into little bits of user functionality called user stories, prioritizing them, and then continuously delivering them in short two-to-four week cycles called sprints.

More Than Just Building Test Cases.

QA shouldn’t be just limited to the creation of test cases and testing the application. Along with QA engineers should participate and accomplish various responsibilities jointly with other team members as an end-user perspective. They are involved right from the starting of the project. In absence of Product Owner, QA should help keep the team moving forward as a proxy product owner. Furthermore, they can ask questions about the Product Owner to help clear up the business requirements and process things.

Participate In Estimating Stories

During the user story estimation, the team should be more realistic because both “positive” and “negative” scenarios should be considered. QA analysts should provide feedback from their past testing experience as well as other team members’ experiences during every sprint to the product owner.

Here’s a guiding principle to ensure the best accuracy in story sizing: Story Points = Dev Time + Test Time If we add test time to our story sizing, it increases the percentage of stories completed in a sprint.

Attend daily stand up and sprint meetings

The key point of any project success is to have each team member be involved in the complete project cycle and the day to day meetings. Therefore, QA should always be in sync with the development team from the beginning. During the sprint planning session, QA must estimate the effort required for testing the user story. If the QA person is absent from the planning session, testing time and efforts are overlooked hence QA should always attend planning sessions.

Presence in daily scrum, they’re able to up to date with development status and how the project is going on so it is helpful to QA plan their work, QA gets a chance to update the team with on known and critical issues so it will help developers to keep focused on the bug and speed up their plan that is why QA analyst should attend daily scrum.

During the sprint retrospective session, QA provides feedback previously unavailable to development, Help product managers and developers to look at software from the Quality perspective.

Writing automation scripts

Converting user stories into the automation test scripts during the development phase which not only helped in reducing manual testing efforts but also went up in coverage and speed of testing. Automation helps QA in continuous development and continues the Integration project in which in every new build, the tester has to provide immediate feedback for new features are functionally working or not and as well as any regressions test cases working correctly.

Conclusion, QA is like a pillar for any Product to successfully delivered & run!