Agile- "Everything gets stuck in testing"

This blog is a series of posts on the common and difficult challenges many professionals face while implementing Agile. Agile is easy on process but many of us underestimate the difficulty of making it work

Many times user stories are not validated before the sprint complete date. Following are the main reasons

1) There is a "mini-waterfall" within the sprint:  Developers and tester work in silos and a couple of days before the sprint complete starts the interaction. The interaction is transactional like a hand-off process to initiate validation. This is the same as a waterfall! 

2) No one understands the ask clearly: The acceptance criteria are ambiguous(Product owner), the design approach is not clear (Developer) and the test criteria is now known (Tester) 

3) User story size: The user story is too big and is not broken into the right size to make it testable within the sprint.  

Recommendations for Scrum master: 

1) Watch the interaction in daily DSM and if developer and tester are not interacting make a conscious effort to break the silos. The developer should be able to provide some testable features every 1-2 days to avoid a mini waterfall within the sprint. 

2) User story commit should happen only after a certain degree of confidence in the scope and effort required to complete(including validation) 

3) Work with PO to break the user story based on the effort required to develop and also validate within the sprint


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Agile - Team fit

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