Test workflow

As we work according to Agile methodology QA team conducts the testing activities throughout all the development process.

Here’s the list if activities we are engaged in:

Planning and “grooming” sessions

The standard sprints take 10 days. We begin our work with Planning sessions, where we provide our estimations about how long this or that task would be in the testing phase for. When making the estimations we refer to: our experience from the previous sprints, tasks complexity, to the relations of the task under estimation to another tasks from the sprint backlog. This way we help our project management and BA to understand how to plan the sprint in the most efficient way.

Development

As the development team starts working on the tasks assigned to them, QA team proceeds with preparing test scenarios in the test automation framework. As soon as the development process goes further, the more possibilities we have to start adding the implementation for the previously prepared scenarios. This is the process that may last until the very end of the sprint, as the tasks are carried out by development team one by one. As soon as the code for some task is written and passed the review, the tasks gets into the hands of QA team for exploratory testing, for polishing the test automation code and for running the regression suite in order to make sure the product is still as functional as it was before the code changes. As soon as we are done with the previously mentioned activities, the code is ready to be merged to our develop branch along with the test code.

Mid-sprint reviews

When the sprint is already ongoing, there are cases our project team tends to have the special sessions in the middle of the sprint. This is needed for synchronisation of the work within the team members, to understand where we stand at and to communicate any issues or concerns which evolved after some work has already been done. It’s clear that sometimes the estimations made during the planning may differ from the reality, therefore in order to oversee the best way of completing the sprint the following sessions may be used for.

Retrospective sessions

During this kind of sessions QA team always aims to raise issues related to the overall development process as well as internal QA processes. We pay attention to all the inconveniences that we faced during the sprint and are thinking of the ways to get them resolved. When the solution for the problem is found, one of our team members takes responsibility for implementation of that solution.

New feature demos

Our work consists of re-testing of the previously reported defects as well as of new features development. When the part of a new feature is developed to the extent for it to be presented, we check if it responds to the requirements and take it to the demo. We use demo sessions to exchange our achievements with the second part of our project team, which is located in another HSBC office.

Daily stand-ups

Of course the crucial part of the team work in Agile environment are daily(morning) stand-up sessions. QA team actively takes part and provides the information on what they are working on, what has been done up to the moment and what would need to be completed in the nearest future. Very often we also raise any concerns related testing process and exchange information needed for further work on the sprint tasks with the development team.