Agile Quality Assurance

This book describes the activities carried on by QA team working with the empowered agile teams. Everyone on a cross-functional software development team must understand and embrace the entire team approach to quality. The book explicitly explains QA as it relates to: improving communication between QA and development, putting QA in the same iteration as development. The book explains how QA continues to help to reduce agile risks and cost as the product continues to change from sprint to sprint. It explains QA’s contribution to agile scaling; QA verses test plans and test cases development, QA’s involvement in the acceptance criteria development and reviews

Quality is not the sole responsibility of QA. If the whole team doesn’t take quality seriously, the release of new features will always be delayed or worse, buggy software gets released. I have heard many people referring to QA as just a testing entity, which possibly means QA does nothing within the agile environment other than testing. In addition, speaking of agile software development QA, some people may also think that it is just for monitoring agile software development processes, or doing testing only on the project. In Agile Quality Assurance, Anthony Baah shows clear evidence of the benefits for using agile QA in the software development concept and the Quality. QA acts as a liaison between the agile team and the business to ensure agile development policy and practices are adhered to. The agile QA provides the agile system engineering lifecycle expertise and guidance to the business people, release management and stakeholders. The team ensures that all the systems of the project go through the agile system engineering lifecycle process successfully. • PART I: Overview: Transitioning into Agile Transformation o Chapter 1 Agile Software Development Approach Transformation o Chapter 2 What QA Team Stands For in Agile Software Development o Chapter 3 The Evolving Role of QA o Chapter 4 QA and the Agile Development o Chapter 5 Scaling Agile QA o Chapter 6 QA - Risks And Cost Reduction in Agile Software Development • PART II: Agile Methodology: The Big Picture of Agile QA o Chapter 7 The Whole Team Approach o Chapter 8 Agile QA vs Test Plans or Test Cases o Chapter 9 Agile QA to Determine if Testing Is Done o Chapter 10 Agile QA vs Acceptance Criteria Development and Review o Chapter 11 Tracking Production Defects – Agile QA o Chapter 12 Improving Communication between Agile QA and Development Teams This book will help you clearly understand the benefits obtained from Agile QA. QA team has the ability to contribute to improving agile work practices within the team environment, ensuring software development efficiency that helps to bring about competitive advantage within the agile software development organization. All these are accomplished by the team’s techniques utilized in finding escaped defects before they get into production environment. There are three hats QA wears which determine the type of helpful roles played in the agile software development. These include quality analyst to know the right things, quality assurer to build quality in, and quality ambassador to indicate if the whole agile team cares

Anthony Baah is currently working for NTT DATA Federal Services Inc. in Mclean, Virginia, USA as a principal agile software development consultant. He earned his doctorate degree in information systems technology management from the University of Phoenix in March 2010. He has had the opportunity to travel to many countries across the globe. He speaks Russian fluently and is working to revive his French. He currently lives in Reston, Virginia, and is working on an agile software development project for the federal government in Washington DC. He loves to read and write. His recent work is an IT book, “Agile Software Development”, which is already published. He has had the opportunity to become a successful agile process professional with proven abilities and dedication to success.