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I'm frankly puzzled how SCRUM sprints are even expected to work with a development + QA cycle. When a sprint starts, what QAs people are expected to do ? When

I'm frankly puzzled how SCRUM sprints are even expected to work with a development + QA cycle. When a sprint starts, what QAs people are expected to do ? When the developers finish, and QAs start testing, what developers are expected to do ? It seems to me that this forced synchronization is just pointless and harmful. Where I work, we handle "sprints" just like checkpoints. This is in developing stage, this is in testing, this is done. It's expected that almost everything spans more sprints.

kiechu 4y ago
Exactly! I have the same experience. It is a source of eternal frustration in the team. I had situations that everyone was crushing it, the team work efficiently and at the end the team had to go through the bashing on retro. There is an argument that you can always add features to the sprint, so you start small and then extend sprint with additional task. But it does not work, because tasks seem to take all the time that was planned for them. However, the rituals of SCRUM like retros and groomings taking place every 2-3 weeks is a good thing. It's like hygiene.
denton-scratch 4y ago
> When a sprint starts, what QAs people are expected to do ? Dedicated QA folk are redundant! The devs write automated tests for all the code they submit. It's 20 years since I spotted a dedicated QA person in the wild.
- mobiuscog 4y ago
  And then the tests are slowly scrapped to get the CI/CD build time down to 'seconds'. Who needs tests anyway, right ?
- amadvance 4y ago
  We may not call people QA, but in the end each person has different skills, and the same problem will arise inside developers. Anyway, the same happens for any multi-phase cycle. Like with code review. When there are dependencies between people, you are going to need extra items to work on while waiting, and this fights with the requirement that everything should be done at the end of the SCRUM sprint.
  - marmarama 4y ago
    There is no requirement that everything should be done at the end of the sprint.
mobiuscog 4y ago
There are no longer QA people - the team is cross-functional and testing is done as part of the scrum. At least, that's the expected 'way'. shift-left (aka put all of the work on the developer)
marmarama 4y ago
Your QA specialists work on tickets with developers and write feature tests alongside the feature. If you're doing TDD then QA can work on turning feature requirements and designs into tests for the next iteration. Integration and performance test development and automation happens alongside, often as separate sprint tasks done by QA specialists. If your QA specialists aren't essentially developers specialising in writing test code then they probably don't belong in a modern development team.

kiechu 4y ago

Exactly! I have the same experience. It is a source of eternal frustration in the team. I had situations that everyone was crushing it, the team work efficiently and at the end the team had to go through the bashing on retro. There is an argument that you can always add features to the sprint, so you start small and then extend sprint with additional task. But it does not work, because tasks seem to take all the time that was planned for them. However, the rituals of SCRUM like retros and groomings taking place every 2-3 weeks is a good thing. It's like hygiene.

denton-scratch 4y ago

> When a sprint starts, what QAs people are expected to do ? Dedicated QA folk are redundant! The devs write automated tests for all the code they submit. It's 20 years since I spotted a dedicated QA person in the wild.

mobiuscog 4y ago
And then the tests are slowly scrapped to get the CI/CD build time down to 'seconds'. Who needs tests anyway, right ?
amadvance 4y ago
We may not call people QA, but in the end each person has different skills, and the same problem will arise inside developers. Anyway, the same happens for any multi-phase cycle. Like with code review. When there are dependencies between people, you are going to need extra items to work on while waiting, and this fights with the requirement that everything should be done at the end of the SCRUM sprint.
- marmarama 4y ago
  There is no requirement that everything should be done at the end of the sprint.

mobiuscog 4y ago

There are no longer QA people - the team is cross-functional and testing is done as part of the scrum. At least, that's the expected 'way'. shift-left (aka put all of the work on the developer)

marmarama 4y ago

Your QA specialists work on tickets with developers and write feature tests alongside the feature. If you're doing TDD then QA can work on turning feature requirements and designs into tests for the next iteration. Integration and performance test development and automation happens alongside, often as separate sprint tasks done by QA specialists. If your QA specialists aren't essentially developers specialising in writing test code then they probably don't belong in a modern development team.