Quality Assurance Activities in Agile - Philosophy to Practice

Abstract: Quality assurance activities, in software development, are the backbone of whole project. These activities are not only responsible of product quality, but also for process quality. In conventional software development QA is a separate group of QA experts. As the trends of software development moved towards agile development, QA activities also got changed. In agile development most of these activities are performed by developers. Close people collaboration, onsite customer and Test Driven Development are the approaches in agile development to achieve better product quality. In this thesis we have presented the philosophical as well as practical angle QA in agile development. Mindset of agile development revolves around product quality but there is much work to be done to impart quality of process in agile development to get it standardized and more organized. QA activities remain centric and focused to testing. Practices like SPI and following some standards are lacking in agile methodologies. In this thesis we have proposed to inject an extra layer of QA in agile projects. Purpose of injecting and extra layer, is to use the knowledge of QA experts to achieve quality in development process that will result in higher level of product quality.