The Activities To Be Followed By a QA In Scrum Process

Activities to be Followed

A Tester plays an important role in the scrum process and QA is one of the most responsible assets of the Team. Following are the activities to be followed by the QA in Scrum.

1) Dwell Deeper:

A QA need to thoroughly study the user stories and their acceptance criteria became ready and he/she think deeper about all the hidden outcomes and the dependencies and what could be the better approach to do it.

QA should share his ideas with the BA and need to collaborate and communicate with the development team because it might be possible that have not thought about this.

If there is any negative impact or the hidden outcomes you found then it's very critical to raising them with the and the project manager and then that ll give them more time to think and act accordingly. For the large project, it became more critical because several modules are spread across the team.

Impact and dependencies study is very important for the QA and development team also would be aware with the same.

2) Involve In Estimations:

Due to the small sprints, the QA may not be asked for involve in the estimation for the time required for the testing the tasks but you(QA) should never accept this and try to raise your voice but before this you need to make sure that the estimated time should also include the time for research, time for collecting historical data, time for environment setup etc., but be specific and strict about the required/estimated time for carry out all the testing activities and these time values added with the development tasks along with user story time.

QA is only responsible for failure if he/she is unable to complete the work in the allotted time.

3) QA on the Whiteboard:

I would like to suggest that QA should also maintain the tasks and bugs on the white scrum board as well, it will help to encourage the team and also good for the scrum master to figure out the status of the overall user story by just simply looking at the board.

The numbers of the Tasks in to do list, the bugs/tasks in the in-progress list and same for the QA activities TO DO, In progress and the list of done tasks, speaks for themselves.

It’s effortless and the less time taking process as compared to compile the status of the testing stories from the tool.

4) Documentation:
Documentation is one of the cons of the Scrum because sprint size is small and there is not having much time for the documentation. It’s also difficult to have a technical writer in a scrum. The QA is the right person for the right job by helping the BA to update the user stories because he is the one who test and knows the functionality in and out. QA should also take it as a responsibility if BA is not there and the Scrum master is busy with the other tasks.

Because it’s not easy to keep the track of “done” user stories when requirements getting changed, its just like to search a needle in a haystack.

QA should have to make a separate task for documentation and update/ created it whenever it’s possible or when the workload is less.

5) Sprint Review/Sprint Demo:

QA is the best person who is chosen to give the demo to the Stakeholders and to the project owner (PO). Because he/she having the knowledge of the functionality in and out and he/she is the one who has tested all user stories.

The demo is very important for the business point of view and QA should have to prepare well for it and try to answer for each query that the stakeholders and the PO have.