Understanding Scrum

Question

I have been working as a .net developer following waterfall model. When working on, say a 12 months project, usually my team follows Analysis, Design, Coding and Testing phases. But when it comes to following Scrum process, I don't really understand How I need to deal with it.

Consider a sprint for 4 weeks and our backlog has 10 items, And let the sprint start now. If developers are working on some bakclog items for first 10 days, I don't know if testing(both SIT and UAT) will require JUST the remaining 10 days to complete the work. And now our sprint does not have any time to do last minute bug fixes and only few bugs could be fixed IN THE PLANNED SPRINT.

And when we do development, how can we make sure that we keep the testing team busy apart from just preparing test cases and waiting for us to deliver the functionality?

This raises a question if we need to deliver the first task/feature within the first 3 days of the sprint, so that testers might be ready with their test cases to test that piece.

I also need to educate my client to help in adapting the scrum process.

I need some guidelines, references or a case study to make sure that our team follows a proper scrum process. Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

The sprint doesn't end with perfect code; if there are remaining bugs, they can go in the very next sprint, and some of the other items that would have went in the next sprint will need to be taken out. You're not stopping a sprint with something perfect, but ideally, with something stable.

Answer 2

You are (ironically) applying too much rigor to the process. The whole point of an agile process like scrum is that the schedule is dynamic. After your first sprint, you work with the users/testing team to evaluate the progress. At that point, they will either ask you to change details and features that were delivered in the first sprint, or they will ask you to do more work. It's up to them.

It's only eventually, once you have determined the velocity of the team (ie. how many stories one can reasonably accomplish in a sprint) that you can start estimating dates and things for larger projects

Answer 3

First of all, not every Sprint produces a Big Release (if at all). It is entirely acceptable for the first sprints to produce early prototypes / alpha versions, which are not expected to be bug free, but are still capable of demonstrating something to the client. This something may not even be a feature - it can simply be a skeleton UI, just for the user to see how it will look and work like.

Also, developers themselves can (and usually do) write unit tests, so whatever is delivered in a sprint should be in a fairly stable working state. If a new feature is half baked, the team simply should not deliver it. Big features are supposed to be devided into small enough chunks to fit within a single sprint.

Answer 4

You definitely don't want to do all development in the first half of the sprint and all testing in the second half. That's just a smaller waterfall.

Your stories and tasks should be broken up into very small, discrete pieces of functionality. (It may take a while to get used to doing this, especially if the software you're working on is a monolithic beast like a previous job of mine that moved to using scrum.) At the beginning of the sprint the testers are developing their tests and the developers are developing their code, and throughout the sprint the tasks and stories are completed and tested. There should be fairly constant interaction between them.

The end of the sprint may feel a bit hectic while you're getting used to the methodology. Developers will feel burdened while they're working on the rest of the code and at the same time being given bugs to fix by the testers. Testers will grow impatient because they see the end of the sprint looming and there's still code that hasn't been tested. There is a learning curve and it will take some getting used to, the business needs to be aware of this.

It's important that the developers and testers really work together to create their estimates, not just add each other's numbers to form a total. The developers need to be aware that they can't plan on coding new features up until the last minute, because that leaves the testers there over the weekend to do their job in a rush, which will end up falling back on the developers to come in and fix stuff, etc.

Some tasks will need to be re-defined along the way. Some stories will fail at the end of the sprint. It's OK, you'll get it in the next sprint. The planning meeting at the start of each sprint is where those stories/tasks will be defined. Remember to be patient with each other and make sure the business is patient with the change in process. It will pay off in the long run, not in the first sprint.

Answer 5

In an ideal Scrum team, testers and developers are part of the team and testing should occur in parallel of the development, the phases are overlapping, not sequential (doing things sequentially inside a Sprint is an anti-pattern known as Scrumerfall). And by the way, contrary to some opinions expressed here, an ultimate Scrum implementation produces DONE DONE stories so testing - including IST, UAT - should be done during the Sprint.

And no, testers don't have to wait for Product Backlog Items (PBI) to be fully implemented to start doing their job, they can start writing acceptance tests scenarii, automate them (e.g. with FitNess), set up test data set, etc (this takes some time, especially if the business is complicated) as soon as the Sprint starts.

Of course, this requires very close collaboration and releasing interfaces or UI skeletons early will facilitate the job of testers but, still, testers don't have to wait for a PBI to be fully implemented. And actually, acceptance tests should be used by developers as DONEness indicator ("I know I'm done when acceptance tests are passing")¹.

I'm not saying this is easy, but that's what mature (i.e. Lean) Scrum implementations and mature Scrum teams are doing.

I suggest reading Scrum And XP from the Trenches by Henrik Kniberg, this is very good practical guide.

_{¹ As Mary Poppendieck writes, the job of testers should be to prevent defects (essential), not to find defects (waste).}

Answer 6

A Scrum team is usually cross-functional, which means that the entire team is responsible for building completed pieces of functionality every Sprint. So if the QA testers did not finish the testing, it only means the Scrum team didn’t finish the testing. Scrum counts on everyone to do their part. Whenever any is needed, the people with those skills take the lead, but they all have to do their part.

Answer 7

Try to do continuous integration. The team should get into this habit and integrate continuously. In addition, having automated unit test suite built and executed after every check-in/delivery should provide certain level of confidence in your code base. This practice will ensure the team has code in working and sane condition at all time. Also it will enable integration and system test early in the sprint.

Defining and creating (automated) acceptance tests will keep people with primary QA/testing skills busy and involved right from the sprint start. Make sure this is done in collaboration with Product Owner(s) so everyone is on the same page and involved.