LEVERAGING AGILE TO IMPROVE QUALITY

Many a company have also quickly realized that Scrum and SAFe turned out to be insufficient. No amount of daily standup meetings or big room planning was going to solve their quality issues, so they assumed that either they did something wrong—or that Agile doesn’t work at all.

PAVING THE WAY FOR QUALITY WITH AGILE

The problem is that, at scale, in multi-team, dependency-riddled organizations the performance of the individual teams is almost irrelevant—which is why when Agile methodologies are relegated to a team-level activity, it almost never works.

It’s not until we leverage larger, vertical slices of the organization and begin integrating the work the teams are doing with an upward intentionality that we begin to see real improvement in quality.

But this takes a certain set of conditions. It takes 3 Things:

• Teams
• Backlogs
• Working Tested Product

Basically you need to create an environment where you have a well-articulated backlog that flows into a team that consists of six to eight people that have everything they need to deliver a working tested increment of product—an increment of product that actually works and is valuable to the business.

THE IMPACT OF AGILE ON THE SYSTEM OF DELIVERY

So, what we’re looking for are cross-functional teams, clear backlog, good acceptance criteria, work broken down as small as possible, so that we can integrate the Dev Teams and QA Teams as we go and create feedback loops throughout the life of the Sprint.