Quality in an Agile World: Examining the Changing Role of Quality Professionals
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Quality is an inherent aspect of true agile software development, and it is one of the criteria that you should look for in an agile project. The majority of agilists take a test-driven approach to development where we write a unit test before we write the domain code to fulfill that unit test, the end result being that we have a regression unit test suite at all times.  We also consider acceptance tests as first class requirements artifact, not only promoting regular stakeholder validation of our work but also their active inclusion in the modeling effort itself.  We refactor our source code and database schema to keep our work at the highest possible quality at all times.  The challenge for quality professionals is that agilists work in a highly collaborative and evolutionary (iterative and incremental) manner, often requiring traditional quality professionals to change their approach.

Download: Quality in an Agile World ( 117K PDF ), an article that I wrote for the September 2005 issue of Software Quality Professional describing the changing role of quality in agile software development.

Related Reading

• Agile Testing and Quality Strategies: Discipline Over Rhetoric
• Agile Testing Strategies
• The Criteria for Determining Whether a Team is Agile

• Evidence that Agile Software Development Scales

• Full Lifecycle Object-Oriented Testing (FLOOT) Methodology
• Model Reviews: Best Practice or Process Smell?
• Quality in an Agile World

• Test Driven Database Design (TDDD) (the link is to a PDF of the magazine in which the article appeared)

• Test-Driven Design (TDD)
• Validating Agile Models

• Whence Data Quality?  A Survey Into the Current State of DQ

  • Discussion and source data downloads are here

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I actively work with clients around the world to improve their information technology (IT) practices as both a mentor/coach and trainer.  A full description of what I do, and how to contact me, can be found here. 

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