How do you maintain product quality during rapid agile iterations?

User Story Breakdown: Split stories into manageable parts for easier development and testing. Shift-Left Testing: Begin testing early with unit/integration tests and service mocking at each app layer for quicker issue detection and resolution. QA Engineer Involvement: Engage QA engineers from the start of the development process. They are not just end-of-process testers. Their user-focused perspective can add significant value during code development. Adopting a Test-Driven Development approach at that level accelerates development. Metrics Goals: Strive to find fewer bugs in QA environments. Find and fix as many bugs as possible pre-QA deployment.

To maintain product quality during rapid agile iterations, I focus on automated testing, continuous integration, and frequent code reviews. I prioritize small, manageable increments and ensure each sprint includes dedicated time for refactoring and bug fixes. Close collaboration with QA and regular feedback from stakeholders help catch issues early. This way, I balance speed with maintaining high standards.

It requires continuous testing, clear documentation, stakeholder engagement, and consistent code reviews. By prioritizing these practices, teams can maintain quality even as development speeds increase. But this is an ideal world and I may be wrong, but at work, we have slightly different realities which we adapt to this "ideal" world.

The Acceptance Criteria defined within the specs define the success of an agile sprint. The results and open defects tell the true story

Continuous collaboration with business and stakeholders and getting their feedback ensures quality during rapid iterations. Vertical Slicing |Incremental development| demonstration- Breaking down the user stories into smaller functionalities with clear requirement documentation and definition of done. Each sprint should end with a demonstration of the work done to the stakeholders. Continuous integration and deployment streamline the development process, allowing teams to integrate their work frequently. This helps to identify and fix integration issues early, and Faster release cycles Continuous Testing - can be done with integrating automated tests into the development pipeline for identification of issues early on.

Testing does not need to be continuous to achieve success. Indeed, continuous testing suggests a lack of confidence in the quality of the product being delivered.

Implementação de processos de teste abrangentes: Desenvolver e implementar planos de teste abrangentes que cubram todos os aspectos do software, incluindo funcionalidade, desempenho, segurança e usabilidade. Isso ajuda a garantir que o produto atenda aos padrões de qualidade esperados pelo cliente.

Fornecer feedback contínuo à equipe de desenvolvimento durante todo o ciclo de vida do projeto. Isso permite que os desenvolvedores corrijam problemas rapidamente e façam ajustes conforme necessário, reduzindo a probabilidade de rejeição do projeto pelo cliente.

Reviews of the sprint results and defects raised by the test team, the BA’s and the Product Owners will determine the quality of what is being delivered. Defects don’t necessarily mean that quality is being compromised but they may indicate weak requirements or poor analysis

User feed back helps to maintain the product quality, because a tester or developer can't be able to think completely in user perspective

In over 35 years in IT I have never heard of technical debt. There is a cost to everything that you do but it’s not specifically technical debt, it could be requirements debt or lack of knowledge debt or I can’t be bothered debt. Another term seen as something new in the world of IT delivery.

As Martin Fowler writes, Technical Debt is a metaphor for making a purchase on a credit card. There are times that you must do it, but if you delay paying the debt off, interest will accumulate rapidly and will soon become debilitating.

1. Planning is very important, plan each release and decide what can be done in each release. 2. Set a baseline of what are the Core Features that should not be impacted, Create a Test Plan for smoke tests before each release cycle. This is to make sure core features are not impacted by new implementations. 3. Identify any dependencies in advance and work to get them done together without impacting other features. 4. Involve Implementation team to review the new changes coming up, seek input, work on it before you push it to production. 5. Test the new features & any existing features that may have an impact due shared or reused components. A change at one place should not impacting elsewhere.