Improving the QA activities in agile sprint cycle.

I thought of sharing the new cycle of methodologies introduced in our project. We always had issues in the code being introduced to the QA environment which was missing some of the requirements or overlooked. Even QA had observed issues in the code which could have been eliminated by a simple check in the dev environment. All these issues lead us to introduce new stages of testing in the agile scrum cycle. 

Listed below the same.

Dev Box Testing.

          The QA team made sure to run the functionality check (story based) in the dev environment. We made sure the functionality is achieved before the story is committed to the QA environment. The QA team always had a discussion with the dev team and business team (here BA) on any issues observed in the dev box testing. Once all the issues are fixed in the dev environment the code was pushed into the QA environment for further QA activities.

Whats the significance of this stage?

We observed this helped to reduce a lot of functional issues and also save time as numerous builds could be avoided to fix them. Almost 30% of time and 50% of issues were found during the dev box in our projects. This also helped the QA team to understand the functional flow of the story before the actual testing starts in the QA environment.

Peer Review

Soon after the normal QA activities are done for the story, peer level testing is done by 2-3 testers together with some exploratory test cases recording the behavior and outputs. If there are issues found during this stage testing will be continued till an acceptable level of quality is attained. 

Whats the significance?

This stage helped us to capture issues which were more of hidden in nature. We were able to find 10-20% of issues during this phase of testing. This also gave more insight to the QA and connect the story behavior with others and could also run some of the basic integration checks.

So these phases of testing helped us in capturing issues much before the story is pushed for UAT. Thus apart from the normal testing activities we introduced the above phases which helped us to save time and improve the quality of the deliverables.