A real Agile Scrum implementation in Jira with separated development team and testing team.

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📕Summary

This article describes a real implementation of Agile Scrum with Jira in a enterprise scenario with different work groups that coexists but are separated: development team and testing factory.

🎁Bonus track: Test management with Zephyr Scale

🚩Situation and requirements

It is required to define the way of working in Agile mode, considering the following:

• there is a Scrum Master as usual
• There is an official Product Owner and others people that support the product owner and act with the same permission ( called Proxy Product Owner)
• There is a development team that finish its work when when the unit test are completed
• There is a testing team that design the tests and execute them when the development team has closed the stories
• The testing team depends on the development team and requires to plan its testing work, like the other teams
• The testing team and development team act as separate team and it is necessary to optimize their activities, avoiding bottlenecks
• The testing team requires to work with a Test management tool and trace the test case they produce and execute
• There are different kinds of test executed by Testing factory: Functional tests, UAT, Not regression test, system integration testing
• The testing team reports bugs to the development team, trying to maximize the bugs found during testing phase and reduce the bugs found on production
• Reporting and monitoring performance is essential

🏗️Work items architecture

🛠️Implementation

• Sprint duration of 2 weeks
• Epics contains the following work types:
  • Story (development story)
  • Test Story that represent the activity of testing related to a Development story, with a test type field (FUN, UAT, NRT, SIT)
  • Bug with standard fields
  • Task for transversal activities or not infrastructure activities
• Use of story points
• The Development stories must be linked to Test stories.
• The bugs must be linked to Epics, Development stories and Test stories
• Zephyr test cases, cycles and test plans must be linked to work items, in order to access from a story to the entire data map

🔑Roles and permissions

• Scrum Master: viewer permissions
• Product Owner: Create and edit development stories and test stories
• Test factory: Create the test stories and bugs
• Development Team: Create the task and subtasks

🛣️Way or work

1. The development team maintains a backlog
2. When they plan the sprint, the development team with Product Owner decide which Development stories to include in the sprint and set the story points.
3. The testing team plan the design test activities for the sprint and include in the sprint the Test stories, with story points
   The unit test design must be executed in parallel with the development of development stories.
4. The testing team plan the test activities to be executed for the sprint related to stories developed in previous sprints and current sprint
5. The sprint plan must be accurate to avoid deviations
6. During test execution, the testing team could detect bug and those bugs could be fixed during the current sprint, or in the next one.
7. The testing team could plan the execution of unit test in the following sprint (setting in the backlog first)

Work items example

⚙️Automations

Create a Test functional story automatically when the development storiy change status

Move Test story to Ready for acceptance automatically when a Development story is ready for test

When the subtask changes to Closed status and there are no other open subtasks associated with the Story, then the Story closes.

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💡Suggestions and open discussions

I invite you to discuss this Agile implementation. What would you have done differently?

Thank your for reading!

[Sanam Malleswari]

Great breakdown of how to balance dev and testing teams in Scrum. The automation examples are very practical!