How do you keep testing aligned with agile delivery?
One thing I keep running into is that even on teams that consider themselves pretty mature in agile, testing quietly drifts into its own mini cycle. Stories are done except testing, regression piles up at the end, and everyone pretends that’s fine until velocity tanks or a bug slips past...
We’ve been trying to bring testing closer to the sprint flow by keeping acceptance criteria tighter, reducing scattered side-docs, and treating test design as part of refinement instead of something that happens after development. It has helped, but the drift still shows up when the team is busy or juggling multiple streams of work.
tooling plays a small role too. test management platforms like Qase, Tuskr, Xray, etc. make it easier to keep tests attached to stories and avoid the usual “where is the latest version” chaos, but tools alone don’t fix the process gaps.
For teams that feel like they’ve really cracked this
How do you keep testing truly integrated inside the sprint instead of trailing behind?
what practices ensure stories are done without padding sprints?
And how do you prevent regression from growing unchecked as the product expands?
If the team were limiting their work in progress effectively, they would be focusing on finishing one or two stories at a time, Done finished and tested, before they pull in the next. They may even be doing test-driven development to ensure testing doesn't drift, and they would be automating those tests so regression packs can scale. Scrupulous refactoring can help to descale the challenge in the first place.