As many organizations are adopting the agile project methodologies and giving up the traditional SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) or waterfall project methodologies, the existing project teams such as the QA team, development team, etc. are losing their core meaning. Here, we are going to discuss why there is no QA team in Agile projects. The core definition of Agile is a collaboration among people with various skills and mindset who together work as a team to achieve a common goal irrespective of the team tags such as the QA team, development team, etc.
The agile project methodologies such as Scrum, Kanban, etc. have very limited roles such as product owner, scrum master, and team members. It is powered with the key focus to deliver the business objective which is open to the frequent changes in a very less period. Therefore, in such a situation, the role and responsibilities of the QA team are not clearly defined or explained in the agile methodology. A typical Agile Scrum team consists of developers, designers, analysts, QA, and scrum master.
When we discuss the QA team in Agile framework, it immediately draws a line between developers and tester and therefore removes the core responsibilities of the developers in the Agile team for doing the due diligence of obeys coding standard, writing and executing unit test cases, etc. as they think that they have a QA team to test their work end-to-end and to find all the defects in the system. Such a model where teams are defined is V-model where each team has its defined boundaries along with the confined roles and responsibilities.
Under such circumstances, the attitude of various team members is different and definitely, there will lack collaboration among the team members of QA, development, implementation, and business analyst teams. In order to narrow down this gap and increase the collaboration among all team members from QA, BA, development, and implementation, the agile framework has designed which throws off all boundaries established between various teams and therefore, the Agile Scrum has no QA team but team members who can collaborate and test the assigned stories in the sprint.
Why QA team is not required in the Agile Scrum?
Given below are the reasons why the QA team is not required in the agile project to manage the testers and the testing effort.
Missing Testing team
In the agile project methodologies, we cannot hear the teams such as the Development team, testing team, etc. The testing team is composed of a group of testers who work together without the mediation of the developer and manger by the QA manager of the QA lead. In the case of the agile project methodology, the term testing team is totally missing and there is no testers group and therefore, there is nothing left for the QA manager to many teams or groups of testers. The team members in the agile project methodology are composed of designers, business analysts, developers, and testers where everyone manages themselves and held responsible for their own deliveries contributing towards the high-quality software.
Missing Testing Team Day-to-Day Management
The Agile model welcomes the frequent changes in the business priorities and therefore, the agile team accommodates these priorities. The traditional SDLC model with the QA team cannot cope up with the frequent changes as the testing happens in phases. Therefore, there is no need to manage the day-to-day team activities by the QA manager.
Testing by Developers
In the Agile teams, the developers are advised to the unit test for their own code along with the test acceptance criteria in the user story, so that the assignee to test the user story could focus on the functional testing aspects only based on the test acceptance criteria. The unit tests written by the developers help to unveil the defect quickly right after the development has completed and if anything gets changed that break the existing functionality then it will be notified quickly to the agile team as the unit test will fail. The solid unit test cases associated with any application reduces the dependency on the testers where they can focus more on the exploratory and UAT testing which do not require any extensive planning and documentation. No doubt that the testers add huge value to the quality of the project deliverables when they participate in solution workshops, sprint planning meetings, and pairing with developers to ensure that the piece of code to be tested has the meaningful unit test cases.
Technical QAs in Agile Scrum
The Agile scrum prefers to have technical QAs who can help with the automation of the acceptance tests along with development to make sure that the new features work as expected. Also, some organizations reserve a spot for QA manager who can serve as an expert to the QA team to take can call what needs to e automated and whatnot, the overall testing strategy, guidance, and approach that the QA testers should follow in the agile scrum.
Over to you:
We can conclude that although we don’t have QA team in Agile scrum yet the QAs as the members of the Agile team are advised to be the voice of QA for their respective teams to ensure that their team follows the best QA practices and work towards the Continuous Testing. In Agile organizations, the QAs still follows the key QA practices that will suggest that the QAs should be embedded in the agile teams to ensure the software quality throughout the development in sprints.
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