1. Copyright©2008- 2015 Russell Pannone – rpannone@WeBeAgilel.com Page 1 of 5
The Role of Quality Assurance in the World of Agile Development and Scrum
Recently I was asked “does the role of a Quality Assurance have a place in agile software
development?”
My knee-jerk answer was yes, but what form and function Quality Management (QM) takes
depends on many factors. Some of these factors are:
 Are you in the business of making and selling heart monitoring instruments or
basketballs?
 Is your business highly regulated by State, Local and Federal government?
 Does your business employ 6 or 60,000 people?
 Are your employees co-located or spread out all over the world?
 Are there in place stringent corporate policies and procedures to ensure compliance
with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act?
Let’s start by agreeing quality is everyone’s (individual and team) responsibility and should be
second nature to business analysts, architects, developers, etc. and not just the sole
responsibility of a quality analyst or tester. Quality Management should be viewed as a fully
integrated management and software development philosophy and approach to be practiced
throughout the organization from top to bottom and consistently applied and “kaizened”1 day
in and day out.
Dr. W. Edwards Deming, who is considered by many to be the father of modern quality
management, together with Walter A. Shewhart simplified quality management into an
iterative and incremental four-step continuous improvement cycle; Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA)
as depicted in Figure 1.0.
1
Kaizen (改善, Japanese for "change for the better" or "improvement"; the common English usage is "continual improvement"). In the context
of this article, kaizen refers to a workplace 'quality' strategy and is often associated with the Toyota Production System and related to various
quality-control systems, including methods of W. Edwards Deming.

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Figure 1.0 – The Deming Quality Cycle
Let’s now look at Quality Management with an eye on Scrum. We see Scrum aligns very well
with the PDCA cycle:
 Plan – Release and Sprint Planning.
 Do - Team and customer collaboration by elaborating on requirements, doing some
design, doing some coding, creating builds and doing some integration, and doing some
testing2, in one time-boxed pass through a product development lifecycle.
 Check - Concurrent Testing, Continuous Integration, Daily Stand-Ups, a Sprint Review
and a Sprint Retrospective.
 Act – Adapting the way the team works based on what was learned during the Sprint
and from conduction A Sprint review and a Sprint Retrospective.
Now in the more traditional sense Quality Management is a set of three essential and
interrelated parts as depicted in Figure 2.0.
 Planning
 Quality Assurance
 Quality Control
2
The preceding items should not be interpreted as sequential in nature.

3. Copyright©2008- 2015 Russell Pannone – rpannone@WeBeAgilel.com Page 3 of 5
Figure 2.0 – Quality Management
Delving into Quality Assurance (QA), let’s take a look at how practicing quality assurance might
take shape in an agile software development effort:
 QA integrated into every team – A member of the QM team is now an active participant
in sprint planning and a sprint.
 QA & testing role - If the role of Quality Assurance Analyst exists in your organization
the Quality Assurance Analyst could be held accountable for helping the development
team identify how they know when a story or task is "done". They help define done by
co-developing tests with the team that anybody can run including the Quality Assurance
Analyst. They also help determine how best to implement that test (manual or
automated, which tools, etc.)
 QA & team adaptation – If the role of Quality Assurance Analyst exists in your
organization the Quality Assurance Analyst could lead your sprint retrospectives. The
Quality Assurance Analyst will be the ambassador for the team doing the right things to
ensure an eye on quality is built into the teams’ way of working. The Quality Assurance
Analyst will track that all action items from the retrospective get reflected in the work in
future iterations and releases and monitor the progress as action items are addressed.
Now with an eye on Quality Control let’s look at the monitoring of specific Scrum artifacts and
outcomes, as depicted in Figure 3.0.

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Figure 3.0 – Iteration Lifecycle in Scrum
Stating the obvious, at a minimum and integral to any agile software development project,
there should be evidence of a product backlog, sprint backlog, and the emergence of a product.
The supposition here is not to imply your approach to agile development and applying the
Scrum framework is artifact centric. What is important is you leverage the use of the product
backlog, sprint backlog and each product increment to check if you are doing the right things
and doing those things right.
Keeping this in mind the product backlog, sprint backlog and product increment should have
the following minimal set of characteristics3:
 Product backlog3
o The owner of the items in the backlog is known.
o The items in the product backlog have been prioritized by the product owner
and have been assigned relative commercial or operational business value using
story points.
 Sprint backlog3
o Items in the sprint backlog have been drawn from the product backlog.
o The items in the sprint backlog have been prioritized by the sprint team and
have been assigned an estimate to complete using story points, ideal days, or
hours.
 Product increment3
o A fully tested demo-able or production ready build (product increment) has
been delivered
3
This is not a complete list of characteristics.

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Though quality control should be inherent in self-directing and self-organizing agile teams the
integrity of the product backlog, sprint backlog and product increment serve as excellent
barometers used to check if the team is doing the right things and doing those things right.
In conclusion, studies have shown that about 50 percent of time is spent on avoidable rework
rather than on value-added work, which is basically work that's done right the first time. Once a
piece of software makes it into the field, the cost of fixing an error can be 100 times as high as it
would have been during the development stage.
Agile development and using the Scrum framework, with an eye on quality management, works
to solve these problems by:
 an emphasis on individual, team and enterprise-wide collaboration
 effectively dealing with uncertainty by the amount and significance of learning and
new knowledge gained by working through each sprint and delivering an increment
of the product
 testing component dependencies earlier in the development lifecycle
 finding “missed” requirements more easily and sooner by surfacing
misunderstandings in deliverables and scope
Delivering a quality product is all about the practical application of being agile and the Scrum
framework while staying focused on bringing people together to collaboratively and adaptively
develop value-added product increments in a continuous flow from requirements to
deployment.