QA joins too late and bottlenecks the sprint
What strategies do mature teams use to prevent this bottleneck from happening?
“We finish coding on the last day, and hope the QA can find every bug and still finish before the Sprint Review.”
This is one of the most persistent and frustrating problems in Agile teams.
Developers start working on stories at the beginning of the sprint, coding for the first few days. QA engineers might be finishing testing from the previous sprint or waiting for “something to test.” By day 6 or 8 of a 10-day sprint, the first stories begin arriving in the Test column.
Then the problem begins.
Between days 8 and 9, all the completed development work arrives in QA at the same time. The QA team quickly becomes a bottleneck.
By day 10, the team is faced with uncomfortable choices:
extend testing into the next sprint,
mark stories as done without proper testing, or
fail to meet your sprint commitment
None of these options is good.
So…
What should the team do?
How do mature teams handle this problem?
This post is all about understanding the small things mature teams do to handle QA bottlenecks.
Let’s get started.