I am a developer and have worked at this company 4~5 years by now.
We have been practicing scrum for about 2 years.
I think, I have been worked well with QAs.
I believe QAs/developers/technical writers are all one team.
We are also actively hiring new team members.
As a legacy member of the team, I have faced to assist new member(including developers and testers) with my business knowledge.
We work on 2 weeks base scrum.
I usually deliver my user story completely by the first date of second week and do some qa build with partial functionality of my user story so that QA has a good idea about my implementation and flow.
Recently, I have met some QAs.
In first week, the QAs do not talk… In stand up meeting, they say they are developing test cases regardless I deliver the user story or not.
In second week, I do not have a single defect till Thursday afternoon and suddenly I have a major defect with several minor UI defect, which I delivered one week ago.
Or I have one or two minor defects on second week however major defects on Thursday afternoon or Friday morning.
This eventually make the story rolls over to the next sprint.
Major defect takes time to fix and more importantly it would trigger the regression test for the story… Even if I worked Thursday evening and fixed it, the testing will not finish.
And this happens multiple times with certain QAs.
As a same team member, I talked to the QAs if they could test major defect with higher priority… Rejected… Because I do not understand QA process..
So I asked roughly how many major test cases are covered so far in the stand up meeting on 2nd week Wednesday.. The response is I should not ask this to the QA in the stand up meeting…
What do I do?
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You need to ask the question why you are not finding these major defects yourself. Once you find that answer, you may find the answer to the question why they are finding them on Friday morning.
Are they finding defects in work you did (arguably unacceptable), or regression (Maybe tighten you UTs), or requirements defects?
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So I asked roughly how many major test cases are covered so far in the stand up meeting on 2nd week Wednesday.. The response is I should not ask this to the QA in the stand up meeting…
What do I do?
Effective communication is a key. Speak with your QA’s personally, not just in meetings. Try to set meetings or sent an email requesting the status of testing, if you don’t hear back from your QA or if they work remotely.
This might be a common scenario when the scope of project is big and QAs have to make regression test without automated tools.
Or it might be the case with QA’s that are less experienced. Who are testing UI things first and main functionality after that 🙁
Another approach would be spending time to understand how your story will be tested and writing down possible test scenarios that may be. Covering test cases in parallel with development is preferred way to go, but hard to accomplish. However, one you get used to this type of development then 99% your code will be safe.
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