Tag: user stories

4 Exit Criteria your User Stories must have

Nishi Grover GargLeave a comment

Planning and developing new features at the fast pace of agile is a hard game. Knowing when you are really done and ready to deliver is even harder.

Having predetermined exit criteria helps you be able to make the decision that a feature is truly ready to ship. In my article published at TestRail Blog, I compiled a list of exit criteria you must add to your user story to make it easy to bring conformity and quality to all your features.

All Tasks Are Completed

This first one sounds obvious, but it may not be. I still see many teams struggling with getting their testing done within the sprint. Developers work on a user story and deem it done, while testers are left to play catch-up in the next sprint.

Put that practice to an end once and for all by making sure that no user story can be proclaimed done without having all tasks under it completed, including development tasks, testing tasks, design and review tasks, and any other tasks that were added to the user story at the beginning.

Ensuring all tasks are completed in a sprint also mandates that you begin thinking in depth about each user story and the tasks necessary for each activity to be completed, so that you do not miss out on anything at the end.

Tests Are Automated Whenever Possible

As our agile teams move toward continuous delivery and adopting DevOps, our testing also needs to be automated and made a part of our pipelines. Ensuring that test automation gets done within the sprint and is always up to pace with new features is essential.

By having test automation tasks be a part of a user story delivery, you can keep an eye out for opportunities to automate tests you are creating, allocate time to do that within the sprint, and have visibility of your automation percentages.

I have used the following exit criteria:

  • At a minimum, regression tests for the user story must be added to the automation suite
  • At least 50% of tests created for the user story must be automated
  • Automated regression must be run at least once within the sprint

Depending on what your automation goals are, decide on a meaningful standard to apply to all your user stories.

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Things to Do Before the Sprint Planning Meeting

Nishi Grover GargLeave a comment

Scrum teams get together to decide on the work items for their next sprint in the sprint planning meeting. But is that the beginning of the conversation for the upcoming sprint, or are there some things that should be done before that?

In my latest article for the TestRail blog, find out what you should be doing before your sprint planning meeting even starts so that you can help make the next sprint successful.

Prioritize the backlog

Prioritize!

The first and most important consideration is to have a live product backlog that is up to date and prioritized with changing business needs. The product owner must have a constant eye on adding, removing, editing and updating items in the product backlog. When the time approaches to get into planning the next sprint, the product manager must bring to the table a list of the highest-value items that the team can pick from.

Research features

The product owner must spend time researching each of the features and trying to lay out in simple terms the actual need they each describe. They may use bulleted points or simple sentences to explain the feature in some detail. We see this happening mostly during or after the sprint planning meeting, but if any requirements are known before the meeting, the product owner can get a head start.

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4 ways Task boards can help Agile teams

Nishi Grover Garg1 Comment

A task board is a physical or virtual chart containing all current team tasks at hand and their progress over time. For an agile team, all sprint tasks can be represented on the task board, and their flow over various stages can be tracked in the daily standup meeting. Task boards are a great way to visually representing pieces of work and their status.

Besides helping to organize and track work and being the focal point of the iteration and relevant meetings, task boards can have numerous more benefits for an agile team. In my article published @Gurock, I have discussed four additional ways in which Task boards can help an agile team-> https://blog.gurock.com/agile-task-boards/

Different styles of Task boards

Main points discussed–>

  • Customize the process
  • Visualize their Scrum
  • Improve Commitment and visibility
  • Facilitate Team interactions

Click here to read more ->