YDS: Where Does Quality Assurance (QA) Fit on a Scrum Team?

(United States)

March 19, 2021

On today’s episode of YOUR DAILY SCRUM: Where Does Quality Assurance (QA) Fit on a Scrum Team? We get this question pretty often, especially when speaking at conferences: "I'm a tester or quality assurance (QA) specialist at a company that just adopted Scrum. Am I now out of a job?" The quick answer is: Of course not, but there are likely some changes coming your way. Quality isn't optional in Scrum. Software testing is a much-needed skill on a Scrum Team.

Ryan Ripley and Todd Miller are the author of Fixing Your Scrum: Practical Solutions to Common Scrum Problems. They are the co-founders of Agile for Humans, the premiere Scrum and Kanban training organization.

Join Ryan and Todd in a Professional Scrum training course: https://www.scrum.org/agile-humans

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Comments (4)

Muhammad Adnan

05:59 am March 19, 2021

Thanks Ryan and Todd. Can you please provide more details about how to run a sprint where the developers are developing stuff and closing the PBIs, where can we fit QA here within a Sprint?

Should a developer complete a PBI and call the QA to test so that together they can close the PBI?
Or the developer can complete development and close the PBI and assign it to QA for testing?

I am confused about the process and the ground where the QA will be playing its role. Please help me to understand this.

08:12 am March 19, 2021

How about @Todd_YourScrumMaster_Miller

08:23 am March 19, 2021

QA should be part of the scrum team, and the DoD should include QA actions. As quality should not decrease during the sprint, the scrum team must have members that can assure quality.

James Daniel

01:52 pm May 18, 2021

Awesome stuff, Ryan!
Nice to hear you and Todd speak on where QA fits in the scrum team. I absolutely agree with you that programmers and QA should be working together for the benefit of the product and the team. In the future episodes, can I expect a practical use case where we could see enterprises reaping benefits by efficiently packaging quality assurance into the fulcrum of the scrum team? Also, here is an insightful article on quality assurance that I found very helpful and will benefit our visitors as well - https://bit.ly/3bSS1AP. This blog talks about Continuous Quality Assurance for multi-cloud strategy and management success.