A dedicated QA person in a Scrum team can help achieve quality by focusing solely on quality assurance tasks. The document describes a scenario where one Scrum team with a dedicated QA person delivered a higher quality product than other teams without dedicated QA. Having a QA specialist allows the person to fully concentrate on test case development, automation, and testing without also having development responsibilities. This dedicated role is needed because quality assurance requires significant mental effort that may not get fully addressed if distributed among generalist team members with other priorities.

1. Dedicated QA person in a Scrum Team
Achieving real quality in software!

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My experience in Scrum
● Studying Agile and Scrum from 2012
● First time in a scrum team at 2013
● Certified scrum master (PSM I – scrum.org)
● Certified scrum product owner (PSPO I – scrum.org)
● Currently scrum master..

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What scrum is trying to achieve?
● Does what stakeholders want
● Do it without bugs
FEEDBACK!
QUALITY ASSURANCE!

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Quality Assurance and Quality Control Terms
● Quality Assurance makes sure you are doing the right
things, the right way.
● Quality Control makes sure the results of what you've done
are what you expected.
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?QualityAssuranceIsNotQualityControl
Nevertheless I will use the term QA

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A story
Blue Team
Yellow Teams
31 2
1 product
4 scrum
teams
3 sub-products

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When the integration time came...
Big quality differences between
the 3 sub-products!!
Why? Because the blue team had
QA in the team!

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Why? Isn't a cross functional team not enough?
● Cross functional team are good but not enough

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Why? Isn't a cross functional team not enough?
if programmers are thirsty for technical knowledge then they
will accept easily to code in areas not so familiar to them.
They are not really interested to become skilled
quality assurance persons.

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Why? Isn't a cross functional team not enough?
Quality assurance needs too
much thinking during the Sprint
The same thing is necessary from a programmer
to do for coding
The mind effort to produce a clean,
expendable code for the Sprint is very big!
The same is true for someone who sits down
and thinks of any kind of weird user story test
scenarios to assure that the application
is not crappy after its declared DONE.

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Dedicated QA Role - Workflow
● Early Sprint – Thinking the way of testing - Test automation
preparation.
● Mid Sprint – Starting manually testing the first ready for test
stories (or parts). Refining the automated tests.
● Late Sprint – Start using the automated tests – Final
refinements – Execute all previous automated tests.

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Bugs are detected during the Sprint
Massive!!

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Maximizing Quality
In Sprint After Sprint