We’ve all seen it: development work is done and the testing column is full. It’s a common experience that many stories are ready to be tested just in the last few days of the sprint. Even though it feels like the sprint is finished, the stories are not done and testing seems to be the bottleneck. It’s frustrating for everyone.
This is how everything started in my team. Earlier this year, we were told we have a problem: we are not finishing all the stories from the sprint. And, in most cases, that happens because they are stuck in testing. Together with my team, we have been working to change this, and I want to share with other testers and developers what worked and what didn’t work.
The solutions I’ll share are:
More people testing
One solution we are exploring is that more team members can help with testing stories. And by team members, I mean developers, yes. There is a general hesitation when it comes to developers testing stories, especially when it comes to manual testing. This may be because of lack of motivation, lack of testing knowledge and maybe even the feeling that “it’s not my job, I would much rather prefer on developing other stories’. I will talk about each of these points and what we are doing to overcome these challenges.
There is a sense of reluctance also from management when it comes to developers testing stories, and the overarching feeling that by doing so, we will end up slowing down the development process. From my experience, this was not the case and I will show it you.
Leveraging automation
But, wait. This is not the only thing we are doing to remove testing as a bottleneck. We also try to leverage more our automation and look into ways to improve it, in order to get faster and better feedback. However, this is not as easy as it sounds, it’s an ongoing improvement process, and I am going to share with you our ups and downs about it.
Including the product owner
And, not only that. As I said in the beginning, we are involving the entire team in these changes, and that includes the PO. Find out how by joining my talk!
In the end, the story I’m going to tell you is about what we are trying to do in our team to share the responsibility for quality and health of the product, as a whole team, and how everybody, from their role, contributes to this. And by doing this, we also might have a chance to not have stories left out not finished at the end of the sprint.