Taking Stock of Your Software Inventory

25th May 2008, 11:27 pm

Do you have inventory piling up between your development team and QA?

This inventory of unconfirmed functionality limits your team’s agility on a few fronts:

your software is not always potentially shippable
deferred ROI
delayed feedback from QA

One of the main goals of your agile team is to build potentially shippable releases every iteration. When QA testing is done after development releases your team can no longer achieve this goal.

This deferred testing also creates an inventory of unconfirmed features that need to be managed. And just like any manufacturing system, inventory is wasteful and costs your company time and money. Every day that your software is not shipped decreases the ROI.

The longer your software remains untested the more costly any corrective action becomes. The cost arises from many factors including the ramp-up time for the developers, context-switching time, overhead with issue tracking and so on.

Finally, feedback from good testers is invaluable. They think differently from developers and tend to have a more outward-looking customer perspective. If you get this feedback earlier in the process you will see a reduction in defects and less rework.

If you find your team in this situation here are a few things you could might consider doing:

Track Metrics

Select metrics such as defect counts or time to close that you feel best highlights the obstacles your team faces. Chart these metrics in big visible charts

Consider translating technical metrics into bottom-line financial data. For example, you could use daily expected revenue of the product to calculate the revenue loss due to each day of delay.

Get Developers and Testers Working Together

There has been much talk about getting quality assurance infused throughout the product cycle. Agile teams are tailor-made for this transition. Get a tester on your team and allow her to contribute throughout the iterationAside from traditional testing, the tester can bullet-proof the story tests, suggest testing tasks, pair with developers on testing and so on

This inter-personal contact will do more to promote quality within your team than any formal QA process ever will.

Stagger Iteration Testing

Staggered testing

If you must maintain a separate system test phase, consider having the QA team test the previous iterations release. This way, the QA team has a stable release for testing and feedback is delayed at most one iteration

Over time, you may be able to move additional QA activities into the development iteration.

Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.