In part one of our series “How to improve quality as a team,” we talked about the effectiveness of adding shoulder checks to the agile development workflow and how that helps improve the overall quality of the product. This article introduces you to another fantastic exercise, you might be familiar, with called the user story kick-off. This practice helps larger teams align on more complex features, and in turn increase quality output as a team.

The software Quality Assurance role (QA) has traditionally been seen as a person who finds bugs and tries to break things. While these tasks still remain a big part of the QA’s role, the industry has seen a shift towards a more holistic approach where the QA role advocates for the overall quality of delivery — both product and process. Incorporating the exercise of “shoulder checks” into the agile software development lifecycle increases quality output.

Embracing DevOps is not easy. There are a lot of misconceptions about what DevOps is. DevOps is not a team, or a methodology, or a job role. DevOps is a culture founded on a set of work patterns and practices that have an impact on the whole value chain, from business to operations. DevOps helps you move from only having visibility about your own work, to having a birds-eye view and overall understanding of the whole value stream (from business to customer feedback).

Historically, software development and quality assurance were one and the same. If you built it, you also tested it. But then software grew up, and as it got more and more complex, dev and QA needed to split up in order to do their job right. But instead of these two teams remaining close friends, they grew far apart. Each in their own world, operating in different environments, using their own workflows, speaking different languages.

In today's competitive market, you can’t afford to risk poor product quality and software failures. Unfortunately, many companies still use outdated methods to manage their tests like Excel, Word, Google Sheets, or other spreadsheet tools. Without a proper test management app, your quality suffers and testing remains archaic and at the most basic level, tracking and logging tests.

Companies looking for digital transformation need to set up their teams for success. Modern development teams can release faster using an innovative suite of testing solutions. The integration with Xray and Functionize fits seamlessly into agile Jira workflows and incorporates AI/ML to speed up testing. The Xray-Functionize integration provides you with easy creation of automated tests, more visibility into testing results, and the capacity to increase team collaboration.