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Today, your host Dan Neumann is joined by AgileThought colleague, John Gravitte, the Director of Quality! John has been in the quality field for about 26 years. He started out doing the testing himself but became a QA Manager in \\u201999 and began to manage teams, which is when he realized he really had a knack for process improvement, streamlining standards, and efficiency. When he arrived at AgileThought, he was introduced to Agile and it was a perfect fit for his quality-oriented mindset!

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In this episode, they will be exploring how testing is done on Agile projects; taking a look at some of the challenges, good practices, anti-patterns, and which standards and processes can really enhance Agile. John also provides many key insights and tips on how to go about leveraging quality and using that within Agile teams.

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Key Takeaways

How to address some of the challenges that come along with testing on Agile projects:

• Use shift left testing (i.e. doing some testing in the development environment to give quick feedback to the developers)
• Implement processes that support quick feedback
• Arrange meetings with developers to understand exactly what they need to know and get clarity on the acceptance criteria
• Have test case reviews and outline the test cases that need to pass prior to coding

How standards and processes can enhance Agility:

• Having a process and a standard documented for a project helps individuals know what they are responsible for
• If the project grows and you have to bring on new talent, having standards comes in handy for pointing newcomers to \\u2014 especially for younger talent
• It\\u2019s not a replacement for thinking; they\\u2019re guide rails
• The processes can always be updated when better ways are discovered

How to ensure quality roles keep up with the rapidly changing codebase and evolving feature sets:

• Use test automation which enables those in quality roles to be able to keep up with the changes and rapid delivery
• QA leads should meet with the test engineers one sprint behind to automate the most relevant pieces first and put that into a \\u2018smoke test\\u2019 which saves time

How does automation pay off?

• Risk really builds up if you don\\u2019t use automation because there\\u2019s no way you can manually verify everything, every time
• The amount of time and the coverage that you get from automation is worth the investment
• As environments get used, data gets cluttered up, so having automation to do the data setup can really enhance quality

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Mentioned in this Episode:

Swagger

Postman

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John Gravitte\\u2019s Book Pick:

Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action, by Simon Sinek

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Want to Learn More or Get in Touch?

Visit the website and catch up with all the episodes on AgileThought.com!

Email your thoughts or suggestions to Podcast@AgileThought.com or Tweet @AgileThought using #AgileThoughtPodcast!