The document highlights the importance of embracing agile values and principles to enhance quality and manage shifting priorities within teams. It discusses challenges in adopting agile, such as resistance to change and lack of management support, and emphasizes the need for clear communication to build trust during the transition. By fostering a whole team approach to testing and iterating on processes, organizations can achieve better quality outcomes and evolve their culture towards agility.

1. Maintaining Quality with Agility
Fran O’Hara – Inspire Quality Services
Fran.ohara@inspireqs.ie
www.inspireqs.ie
© 2017 Inspire Quality Services
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2. Reasons for moving
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Speed – competitive edge
Managing changing priorities
Productive happier teams
Visibility
Improve quality…..
It’s a journey not a
destination

3. So what’s the problem?
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• To get the benefits of agile (including quality) we need
to embrace its values and principles
 Culture and people
• Changing these is hard
– People tend to resist change
So
• Rather than just focusing on mechanics and methods
we need to focus on values, principles and behaviours
– Will also help ensure benefits achieved are sustained and
long lasting

4. Challenges
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Versionone Survey:
• Challenges experienced adopting/scaling agile
– Company philosophy or culture at odds with core
agile values (63%)
– Lack of experience with agile methods (47%)
– Lack of management support (45%)
– General organizational resistance to change (43%)
– Lack of business/customer/product owner (41%)

5. Align all stakeholders
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• Top down and bottom up
– Senior Management
Commitment
– Middle management
– Practitioners – dev, test,
BAs
• Impacted stakeholders
– External and Internal
– Customers, Users, Finance,
HR, Purchasing, Product
management, Marketing,
Support…

6. Some wise words….
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• If you experiment with the move to Agile, starting with
your business reasons for it and using feedback to
ensure that you’re on the right track, you too can ease
your transition.
– Johanna Rothman
• The biggest secret in making the transition to Agile isn’t
in the technicalities of the new process, but in “how”
the change initiative is approached. Leaders and
managers must be clear in their communication around
how the change will affect each team member and what
the benefits are. It is by building trust and removing
doubt and fear that resistance disappears.
– Susanne Madsen

7. Whole team accountability
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8. Test competency & Roles
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Dedicated testers in agile teams?
Technical Testers?
Beware ‘Scrum Developer’
DevtAnalysis
Testing
Tester

9. What can the team do in relation to
quality/test
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• Commit to whole team approach to testing, quality
• Use retrospectives
– Evaluate quality, technical debt, definition of done
• Extrinsic & intrinsic quality
– Inspect and adapt testing
– Focus on one or two problems at a time
– Experiment
• Share lessons learnt – reflect this in an evolving
strategy
• Celebrate successes
– no matter how small

10. Key considerations - Agile Testing Strategy
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Unit/Component layer
Developer Tests
API/Service layer
Acceptance Tests
GUI layer
Manual Tests
Automate at
feature/work-flow
level
Automate at
story level
Automate at
design level
Based on Mike
Cohn
Quality Risks
Code & Bug Fix
Test
Code & Bug Fix
Test
Sprint 2
Code & Bug Fix
Test
Sprint 3Sprint 1
……

11. Common Scrum role issues
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•Product owner
• Push versus pull principle
• Product backlog management
ScrumMaster
• Agile coach?
• Managing versus facilitating
• Part-time
Development Team
• Whole team thinking lacking
• Self organisation missing
• Cross functional - Roles of developers and testers in relation to test

12. Common Scrum event issues
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•Backlog refinement
• refinement, estimation/sizing not achieved
Sprint planning
• No joint design with the whole team
• No Design for testability
Daily standup
• Missing Self organisation as a tool for quality
Sprint review
• Insufficient Validation/feedback
Retrospective
• Not done, not effective – should be Continuous improvement for good enough quality

13. Common Scrum artifact issues
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•Definition of Done
• Weak, not followed under pressure, not improving
• Relationship with quality and technical debt
Product Backlog
• Late elaboration not followed
• Item Ordering, size (too large)
Sprint backlog
• Lack of explicit Quality related tasks to meet the definition of done
Burndowns

14. What it should look like
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• The rise of the team
– Ownership, accountability, success
• Leaders & managers make better decisions
• Remember agile is a journey
– Systemic blockers routinely addressed
• Infrastructure improves, process improves, DoD
strengthens/Technical Debt is managed, …
– Culture evolves to incorporate agile values and principles
• Overall there are better outcomes (including desired
quality levels) at an organizational level

15. www.eurostarconferences.com
Thank you!
Questions?
www.inspireqs.ie
fran.ohara@inspireqs.ie
@OHaraFran