Unified QA practices across four Scrum teams and cut escaped defects by 70-85%
- 70-85%fewer escaped defects, and a unified process for 4 teams
- 4Scrum teams, one process
- 10testers led
Challenge
Testers in four Scrum teams of a large software product each worked in their own way, with no shared test process, techniques, or quality reporting, so quality could not be compared or steered across teams. Testing relied on scripted cases that confirmed documented behavior, so edge-case bugs and defects in lightly documented areas escaped to production.
My Solution
- Led a group of 10 testers embedded across the four teams and owned one shared test process, checking that it was followed or improved, instead of four separate approaches.
- Introduced test design techniques that do not depend on complete documentation: ACC modeling and pairwise testing to cover feature and parameter combinations systematically, and structured exploratory testing with deliberate attempts to break the software in under-documented areas.
- Used statistics and metrics to spot problems across teams and track their resolution, so changes were driven by evidence, not opinion.
- Ran root cause analysis (RCA) on defects that escaped to production, found where process or test design let them through, and fed each finding back into the shared process and the test design techniques.
- Stayed hands-on, taking part in testing and managing testing of MS Office add-ins and web applications, and mentored and coached the testers on the new techniques so the practices spread through people, not just a document.
Result
the four teams now shared one process, one set of techniques, and comparable quality data, and the number of escaped defects per release dropped by 70-85%.