How to measure Quality in Review Meeting

How Does Scrum Ensure Quality?

How Does Scrum Ensure Quality…

 

Quality is a word that is banded around plenty when it comes to services or products. Customers want to ensure that the purchases that they make or the services that they use to be of the highest quality. But what really is quality and how can your Agile team achieve it? How does scrum ensure quality?

In a nutshell, quality can be whatever your team defines it as. In a software development project quality could refer to meeting the acceptance criteria set by the product owner or performing to specifications set by your own team with regards to working practise. Alternatively it could also refer to customer satisfaction, or even team satisfaction if your team decides they are pleased with their efforts. Remember it is possible to give customers a satisfactory response even if you are unable to meet their requirements. This can be achieved in a number of ways, for example by making a particular effort to communicate and resolve difficulties that have arisen during the process.

It is important to sit down with your team at the beginning of your project to determine exactly what quality means to you and what strategies you want to commit to in order to achieve it. Take into account though that quality is fluid. Demands and requirements within the project may evolve and it will be necessary for your definition of quality to flexibly adjust in order to meet these changes.

Flexibility is also a key element of the Agile philosophy for continuous improvement, and this is achieved by performing regular inspect-and-adapt cycles. There are four key inspect-and-adapt points within Scrum and by meeting these; your team can demonstrate a commitment to consistent effort for continuous improvement.  This in turn is how scrum ensures quality.  These points are:

·         Sprint Planning: the corroboration of design and requirements to ensure that every team member is on the same page.

·         Daily Scrum: update on productivity and elimination of waste and stumbling blocks.

·         Sprint Review: opportunity to measure quality of deliveries in each sprint to ensure customer expectations are being met.

·         Sprint Retrospective: lets the team members look back at how they were personally affected during the sprint and what could be done next time to improve the experience.

Who in my scrum team is responsible for ensuring quality? As an Agile team every member has a responsibility for the quality of the finished product. At the beginning of the project you will have sat down together and defined what quality means to your team and how you are going to work to achieve it. Invariably defects and problems will occur; it is a natural part of the development process. However it is how you deal with these speed bumps on the road to production that matter. We advocate addressing them as soon as they arise. You could be forgiven for thinking that it would be more time consuming to deal with them at the sprint stage, all it actually does it bring the quality control stage forward into the sprint and allows for focus on one problem at a time, rather than letting them pile up to be dealt with at a later stage. Attacking the hurdles head on will ensure that the code you have at the end of each sprint will be usable and bug free, which will drastically cut the overall development time.

Testing is crucial as your team will get absolutely no credit for work that is left untested at the end of a sprint – after all there is no guarantee that it will meet the acceptance criteria.
Agile coaching can ensure that your business implements Scrum effectively to ensure that quality is delivered at every sprint. Want to know more? Start your journey today by getting in touch for your no-obligation consultation.

“It is not a bolt to be tightened into place but a seed to be planted and to bear more seed toward the hope of greening the landscape of idea.”