Simultaneously improving quality and time-to-market in agile development

Abstract

More recently, “post-agile” techniques seem to favor releasing early over quality. Pressure for low cost, rapid development and to code for new features leads to the allocation of resources to software development tasks preferably rather than to quality control. Such practices may put the responsibilities for development and test on the same team and even facilitate sloppy testing. Here, we present our experience in organizing an agile team that is divided into two independent cells, each one playing a different role: (i) software development, and (ii) testing exclusively. Results obtained by using a grid computing backup system as a case study point out to higher test efficiency and, surprisingly, possible shorter time-to-market simultaneously when the agile team is split into those two cells, and some complementary practices are adopted as well. These results may contribute to the on-going discussion on the role and impact of testing in agile development.