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QA Bottleneck issue

Last post 02:36 am June 18, 2019 by Ian Mitchell
2 replies
M R
09:01 pm June 17, 2019

I am a scrum master of a team where there is a different manager for each role group - the product owners,  Developers, QA.  our QA people get pulled off onto other teams when there is a higher priority.  because of this we have over 70 items that are code complete but have yet to be tested.  this has been going on for several  months.  I have no control over the managers decisions and we must keep development moving.   The Dev manager does not want the devs to pick up the QA tasks.  it is not an option to slow dev work.  has anyone had this issue and what steps did you tale to resolve it?    thanks

Ben Brumm
10:20 pm June 17, 2019

I've had this issue but not to the extent that you have it.

As a Scrum master you could make this impediment visible and transparent to management. Highlight the issue that work is not being completed and if it continues in this way then the software quality will get worse. Speak to them in language they would understand - e.g. "if our software is not tested then we cannot guarantee that the user registration process works, resulting in lower user satisfaction and lower revenue".

Scrum teams work when the people are focused only on that project, so you could suggest that if a team member is on a Scrum team then they cannot be moved to another team.

You could also suggest the team start the practice of automated testing. This can be a hard thing to get going, but ultimately the development team can write automated tests to ensure the software is working.

The dev manager and QA manager should not be telling the team how to work and what to work on (which it sounds like you already know).

Ian Mitchell
02:36 am June 18, 2019

Is there any concern or interest in why the benefits expected of Scrum are not being obtained?

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