Agile and Scrum

Basketly's team now works in two-week sprints. On day one they pick the story "as a shopper, I can save my cart for later". On day fourteen they show it working to the product owner. There is no separate testing month. So where did the testing go? It moved inside the two weeks.

The rule

Agile ships small slices often; testing lives inside every slice.

Agile is a family of ways of working that value delivering small pieces of working software frequently, getting feedback, and adapting the plan. Instead of one big release after months, you get a usable slice every few weeks.

Scrum is the most common Agile framework. Its key parts:

• Roles: the product owner decides what matters most; the scrum master helps the team work well; the developers build and test. In Scrum a tester is one of the developers, part of the same team.
• Artefacts: the product backlog (everything wanted, in priority order), the sprint backlog (what this sprint takes on) and the increment (the working result).
• Events: sprint planning, a short daily scrum, the sprint review to show the increment, and the retrospective to improve how the team works.

The Definition of Done is the team's shared checklist for "finished". When it includes "tested against the acceptance criteria", untested work cannot be called done, which is what keeps testing inside the sprint.

The shortcut

Map the tester's job onto the sprint with Ask, Test, Show, Improve: ask at planning, test during the sprint, show at review, improve at the retrospective.

The common trap is the "mini-waterfall": coding for nine days and testing for one inside each sprint. It is Waterfall squeezed small, and the last day always overflows.

Drills

Answer fast — trust the rule.

Remember

• Agile ships small slices often; testing lives inside every slice.
• Ask, Test, Show, Improve maps the tester onto each sprint.
• Beware the mini-waterfall; "tested" belongs in the Definition of Done.