Every week, on Fridays, I will send out an email highlighting a concept relating to Agile/Scrum/Continuous Improvement. Here we go…..

We’re sticking with the Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review: Agile collection. This time the note is from the article “Why Agile Goes Awry” by Lindsay McGregor and Neel Doshi.

The snapshot above really gives you some insight in to how much this resonated with me. Highlights, red underlines, vertical highlight (a note taking trick I use) AND a handwritten note all to emphasize NO HANDOFFS.

I can’t tell you the number of teams calling themselves “Agile” that did not have development AND QA/test IN THE SAME SCRUM TEAM. Scrum teams would work on their code and then throw it over the wall to get it tested. What happened to the Definition of Done?

Sometimes it gets worse. I have seen where the QA team LAGS the development team by 1 or 2 sprints. Are you with me? Test picks up the “done” work, tests it, finds issues that need to get corrected, goes back to the person that wrote the code - who, by the way, has completely forgotten about the story from 2 weeks ago. This is SO wasteful.

This is not agile. Dev and QA together. Yes. Yes. I know that there should not be separation but I live in the real world. The world of developers and testers. Have them on the same Scrum Team. Done is when you have FUNCTIONING CODE that is ready to go to Production. That is it.

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