Incorporating quality control activities in scrum in relation to the concept of test backlog

Abstract

Scrum has become popular among the agile methodologies due to the substantial support that it provides to the project management teams. The scrum process delivers quick functionality in the form of sprints. Most of the quality assurance and quality control activities are skipped in scrum because of its short lifecycle and due to the absence of a dedicated quality assurance team. The development team pays more attention to delivery of products according to the customer satisfaction, and the parameters used for this type of assessment are the story success criteria and user acceptance testing. Only acceptance testing and integration testing are not sufficient to achieve a quality product. There is still a clamouring need felt to incorporate other quality control activities in scrum to achieve a quality product. In this work, we have made an attempt to implement the quality control activities in the scrum philosophy by introducing the concept of test backlog. The enhanced scrum model provides quality assessment methodology on the basis of frequency of remaining functional bugs. The concept of test backlog proposed in this study aims at implementing state of the art testing process in scrum. A case study was carried out to validate the model, which produced satisfactory results. Besides, we conducted a survey to access the state of the quality control in scrum. The proposed model and case study results are reported herein.