Sprint planning is an essential component of Agile in which the entire team defines what can be delivered in a sprint and how to achieve it. Though you can find enough information about sprint planning online, there still needs to be more clarity on a QA engineer's roles and responsibilities in sprint planning.
Find out what a QA engineer does to enhance their contribution to sprint planning here.
Agile is an iterative approach to project management in which software development is done in several phases. In each phase, there is constant collaboration with stakeholders to accomplish continuous improvement.
The Agile methodology helps the team:
Sprint planning identifies the sprint backlog before the start of every sprint. This involves the entire delivery team understanding the backlog and prioritizing items. The final output is to commit a team to deliver the identified backlog items within that sprint.
The three fundamental attributes of sprint planning are:
Let's assume there is a goal, a plan to execute it, and a team to work on it. But how to get the team on the same page?
This can be done through sprint planning. Sprint planning helps ensure that the entire scrum team agrees on what, when, how, and by whom the plan will be executed to meet the sprint goal. The benefits of following this are successful delivery and customer satisfaction.
A project's success is always measured by the milestones delivered, and proper sprint planning is the first step in achieving the milestone delivery. Successful delivery also refers to:
Sprint planning is a key phase in agile that allows delivery services to meet and sometimes exceed customer expectations. Customer satisfaction is achieved by:
Sprint planning is an integral phase of the agile process, which is why QA should play an important role from the start by establishing responsibilities. Some primary tasks in which QA engineers should be involved from the start of the sprint planning are:
Other teams within a sprint often overlook testing time. It leads to an unreliable sprint plan with little to no time consideration for QA. The solution to this involves producing an accurate QA estimation that can be done by considering the following factors.
QA should spend enough time understanding the features before providing an estimation. More information on the requirements will help break down the test scenarios effectively, and test estimations can be planned appropriately.
This should be communicated ahead from a technical perspective by a technical architect or a developer. Testing timelines of such features will evolve along with the project's complexity.
All necessary documentation like FSD, design documents, technical architecture, and validation tickets should be ready for testing reference. Beyond this, the readiness of the test management tool, resource availability, test case design, technical walkthrough from developers, and test environment readiness should be counted as dependencies for estimation.
The final estimation should cover the following tasks.
Priorities set from a testing standpoint have a major impact on sprint planning. This is why sprint planning should always be in alignment with the overall project priorities. And the prioritization of stories within a sprint should consider sprint-level dependencies.
Consider the following points to make sprint prioritization advantageous to QA.
Developing the most complex tasks will take time, and test coverage can get delayed if it is planned in the later stage of the sprint. Avoid this delay by handling complex and time-consuming features at the sprint's start.
Some feature validation can be done when its dependent feature is ready. Development of such features can be independent, but testing will be affected due to the dependency. For example, validating an account page without a login feature is impossible. In these cases, the dependent feature should be prioritized in the sprint so that testing is not blocked.
Deployment of some critical features at the sprint end might create a need to retest already tested features in a limited timeline. This test repetition can be avoided by prioritizing all critical features at the sprint beginning.
It is an excellent approach to prioritize some critical bugs from the backlog. This will ensure proper utilization of a sprint along with test scripting and test data preparation work.
It is obligatory to have a thorough understanding of the requirements for sprint planning. This is possible only when the story details are complete, acceptance criteria are up to date, and reference documents or designs are well-equipped.
QA should take a considerable part in user story optimization by identifying variations between FSD, stories, and design early in the sprint. Refocusing requirement gaps at the sprint beginning will bring down unwanted iterations. This will save sprint time and the effort involved.
Beyond this, QA can also help understand the requirement from an end-user perspective and highlight the logical gaps. Reviewing and understanding the story acceptance criteria is one of the key activities of QA engineers at the beginning of every sprint. At this stage, any requirements or technical queries should be clarified before starting the testing activities for complete test coverage.
Participation of QA in sprint planning helps identify associated risks in testing, and respective measures can be planned. Some of the forms of risk that can be handled are:
QA can keep the communication overhead and handle the anticipated risks by being part of sprint planning.
Involvement in sprint planning helps QA to decide which tickets and tasks need to be prioritized. This can help the team achieve better time management and sprint delivery. It can be done by:
Additionally, sprint zero activities involving test documentation like standard operation procedure(SOP), test plan, test strategy preparation, and selection of automation tools should be completed and approved by client teams. The readiness of the test environment and defining quality metrics should be agreed upon across the agile team for uninterrupted testing work from the first sprint.
Avoid making a few common mistakes that often result in a failed sprint delivery.
A sprint planned without a QA engineer is not a well-planned sprint. All the above-mentioned QA roles and responsibilities in sprint planning, individually or as a whole, will significantly help achieve the sprint goal and engineer quality at speed.