Agile/Scrum and Traditional PM-Quality

Quality in any methodology/framework I believe is the true measurement of a successful project. It's the project owner/business/stakeholders job to find out what his users expect and to document it in the product backlog. The success of your project depends on an early determination of the level of quality that the end user product must meet. The definition is no more important than who defines the level of quality, the end users should have final say toward defining quality in any framework. The business has an expectation that you will deliver the level of quality, and he/she should express that exactly the in details while prioritizing the product backlog. You MUST involve your project owner/business/stakeholders EARLY and often in the agile/scrum framework, he/she must be communicated with face to face when you reach the completion of each sprint, if you set up the team and expectations correctly from the beginning then the customer is always aware of it. There are a few quality topics to be aware of that you should level set early in the agile/scrum framework.

Topics of Quality

1. Cost-benefit. Complete all users stories assigned to the sprint, if not move them back to the backlog. Don’t forget to include the cost of rework, costly rework costs money.

2. Flow. Develop a visual depiction (work breakdown structure) of the process or system flow that results in the end product, use this to analyze areas where potential issues can occur.

3. Benchmark. Draw on past agile/scrum projects that have similarities to your project and use the quality they achieved to match yours against.

4. Proof-of-concept. If you've made designs or created models of what your product looks like or how it functions, include that work here, remember to deliver usable software with every iteration.

5. Quality assurance. Co-locate, QA and development so they can pier teach, test, development together so all agile/scrum measurements and standards are applied.

6. Quality control. Automate regression testing (if applicable) Include repeatable tasks that are well defined and are stored in a test harness.

#agilemethodology #scrummethodology #productbacklog #sprint #iteration