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Focus on Quality

5 minutes 5 Questions

In Agile realms, maintaining product quality is as crucial as adhering to deadlines. Agile teams focus on delivering potentially shippable increments (PSIs) at the end of each sprint ensuring that each section of the product is completely done, from coding to testing, before it is considered completed. Leveraging practices like Test Driven Development (TDD), Pair Programming, Continuous Integration, and others, Agile teams incorporate quality checks throughout the development process rather than at the end. This reduces the risk of discovering major defects down the line and ensures a robust, high-quality end product.

Guide on Focus on Quality

What is Focus on Quality?
Focus on Quality is an essential term in Agile principles that emphasizes the importance of preserving high quality in all aspects of the product lifecycle. It allows for continuous improvement and aims to reduce waste, flexible responses to changes, and customer satisfaction.

Why is it Important?
Focus on Quality is vital as it ensures that the product developed meets customer requirements and expectations. It directly impacts customer satisfaction, and reduced quality can lead to lower customer trust and business downfall.

How it Works?
Focus on Quality implies that an Agile team should work towards maintaining quality from the beginning rather than verifying quality at the end. It often implements methodologies such as Test-Driven Development (TDD) and Continuous Integration (CI) as it ensures the early detection of defects and allows for repetitive testing.

Exam Tips: Answering Questions on Focus on Quality
In an exam, when answering questions about Focus on Quality, remember:
- It is not just about the final output or product, but it’s about the approach and processes that lead to that product.
- It requires continuous attention to technical excellence and proper design.
- It is linked with efficient and effective feedback loops.
- Examples and scenario-based questions are common, so understanding the workings of Agile methodology is key.
- Keep in mind the Agile principles and how they tie back to a focus on quality.

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Question 1

As an Agile Certified Practitioner, one of your stakeholders has expressed concern regarding the low quality of deliverables in the recent sprints. They suggest increasing the Testing phase to enhance quality. How should you respond to this situation to ensure quality?

Correct Answer: Implement Test-driven Development, where writing tests before coding helps drive high quality code and design.

The best response to this situation as an Agile Certified Practitioner would be to implement Test-driven Development. This is a software development practice where test cases are developed before writing the code. The idea is to consider the specification and write tests that assert the behavior of the system based on those specifications. Then, you write your code to make these tests pass. This will result in high-quality code and design as it ensures that the code does exactly what it's supposed to do from the start. Increasing the Testing phase in the sprint (Answer 211155) might seem like an intuitive solution but, in reality, it could obscure the root cause of the problem and is not aligned with Agile methodologies. Quality should be assured during each and every process and step, not just at the 'testing' stage. Similarly, reducing the frequency of sprints (Answer 211156) seems to aim to allow for more testing but in fact, such delay could lead to increased feedback loop times and reduced efficiency, which is not in line with the Agile approachIgnoring the stakeholder's concern (Answer 211157) altogether is not an effective approach since accountability and constant communication are key pillars in Agile. Stakeholders should be involved and their concerns should be addressed in a constructive manner.

Question 2

As a project manager in an Agile team, you notice that a new feature is failing frequently in the production environment. How would you address this while focusing on quality?

Correct Answer: Coordinate with the team to improve testing of the feature in the staging environment before deploying to production

The fundamental principle of Agile project management is to iterate between development and testing to achieve a high-quality product. When a new feature fails in the production environment, it means that there are issues the team didn't identify before deployment. This can be resolved by improving the testing strategies, which can be done by coordinating with the team to enhance the quality of testing in the staging environment before deploying to the production. The other options, such as ignoring feedback, requesting overtime, or reprimanding the developer, are not aligned with Agile principles. Refusing feedback hinders learning from mistakes, requesting overtime can lead to developer burnout and degrade their productivity, and blaming a single individual ignores the team nature of the project and might hurt team morale.

Question 3

As a project manager, you have an Agile team that has been constantly missing their sprint goals due to overcommitment. This has resulted in shortcuts being taken which has affected the quality of the product. What is the best way to rectify this situation with a focus on quality?

Correct Answer: Reduce the sprint goal for a few iterations to have manageable work and focus on quality rather than quantity.

The best approach to address this situation is to reduce the sprint goal for a few iterations. This allows the team to manage the workload better and focus more on the quality of the product rather than simply trying to meet a high quantity goal. This approach maintains the Agile principle of sustainable development and respects the team's capacity. Extending the sprint duration doesn't necessarily solve the problem, as it continues to promote overcommitment, just in longer sprints. It may also disrupt the rhythm the team has developed. Adding more team members is not a good immediate solution. According to Brook's Law, adding more people to a late project makes it later. New members will require training and time to get up to speed, which can disrupt the team's momentum. Requiring the team to work overtime is a poor solution. Over time, it can lead to burnout, lower motivation, and reduced productivity and creativity, affecting the overall quality of work.

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