Who Is Responsible For Quality In A Scrum Team?

The Scrum Guide states that Scrum provides a framework for addressing complex adaptive challenges and producing highly valuable products innovatively and productively. A team using this framework has just three responsibilities: the Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Development Team.

We need to examine the duties of each scrum team role to understand better who is in charge of quality assurance inside the team. Before defining quality ownership, we must first examine what quality means in Agile, a popular software development process. Two types of quality can be distinguished when discussing Agile software development: extrinsic and intrinsic. 

What Is Quality In A Scrum Team?

In a Scrum team, quality includes developing products from start to finish. Delivering what the client wants, upholding Scrum principles, controlling technological debt, and maintaining efficiency are all important. A high-quality product that fulfils client expectations and endures in a cutthroat market is the outcome when all these factors come together. Scrum is a subset of Agile, and it has two categories of quality:

• Intrinsic quality: It consists of all the product's inherent characteristics. In addition to uniformity and maintainability, this quality also refers to suitability, durability, or reliability. Test coverage, escaped defects, problems per line of code, and other metrics allow us to quantify this quality.
• Extrinsic quality: This kind functions as the client's value judgement of quality and their impression of it. Measurement of extrinsic quality needs to be more qualitative and based on usage, sales, or customer feedback. 

Who Owns Quality In The Scrum Team?

With Scrum, quality is a team effort shared by all team members, not just one person. This cooperative approach guarantees a high-quality result throughout the development lifespan.

Development Team: They actively contribute to upholding a strict coding standard, write unit tests, and do code reviews. In the end, they are in charge of producing "Done" work, which includes satisfying quality standards.

Product Owner: They establish the product's goals and acceptance standards, ensuring it satisfies user requirements and corporate objectives. They balance functionality and quality by ranking user stories according to their worth and complexity.

Scrum Masters: They help with teamwork, communication, and following Scrum procedures. They support the team in locating and eliminating obstacles that could prevent the delivery of high-quality work.

This shared accountability promotes a culture of quality within the Scrum team. Every team member is committed to providing a product that satisfies corporate goals and user expectations.

Also, Check:What is the User Story

Who Is Responsible For Quality In Scrum In Reality? 

Within the Agile scrum's ethos and practices, developers own the quality of the final result by taking ownership of the increment and iteration. To encourage group ownership of the quality, teams frequently rotate developers throughout project modules as part of this process.

"Owns" refers, in the literal sense and context, to the entire product development team, which comprises the scrum master and the product owner. They play a crucial role in the scrum framework's basis and are essential to the development team. The agile scrum technique is used by the team that is responsible for quality. The scrum master and product owner ensure the agile requirements are fulfilled. Let’s see how different roles are responsible in Scrum. 

1. Product Owner

The product owner maintains the scrum team's attention on the client's viewpoint. During in-person interactions, they ensure that the project vision and market strategy are kept at the forefront of project management. They oversee the upkeep of the product backlog, establish acceptance standards for every item on it, and involve end users, stakeholders, and occasionally other product owners in the development process. Above all, the product owner is empowered to make choices and has an in-depth understanding of both the product and the development process.

2. Developers 

At the end of the day, producing a high-quality product is the responsibility of the Development Team, even though the Product Owner and Scrum Master have significant roles to play. Working together to design, develop, and test the product, members of the development team have a variety of talents and knowledge. The Developer Team members are responsible for ensuring that their work fulfils the established acceptance standards and for the quality of their output.

3. Tester (Quality Assurance)

Although they don't thoroughly "own" quality, testers (QA) are essential to maintaining it in the fast-paced Scrum context. As they develop test cases to find defects, usability problems, and performance bottlenecks, they serve as champions for quality. They take an active role in sprint planning to comprehend user stories and establish testable requirements.

QA reduces rework and enhances overall quality by testing at every stage of the development cycle. This helps to find issues early and enables developers to address them quickly. Additionally, QA actively collaborates with the development team by reporting defects and making enhancement suggestions. They also collaborate closely with the product owner to ensure the provided product satisfies acceptance requirements.

4. Scrum Master

The scrum master connects the team and the PO. As a result, this individual will be in charge of providing quality improvements. The team will be able to share results during the meetings that the master has scheduled. Every team member can provide comments, which raises the eminence. 

The development team determines how to transform product backlog items into high-performing increments, or iterations, with input from the scrum master and product owner. Because everyone on the team has the requisite expertise and is fully committed to the project, there are no titles or subteams inside the team.

5. Stakeholders

Although the Scrum team primarily oversees quality, stakeholders are also very important. They may have a subtle but significant impact on quality. Stakeholders define the overall product vision and goals by setting clear expectations. They direct the team to produce a product that satisfies their expectations by outlining precise acceptance criteria and quality standards.

Stakeholders can stress quality in addition to utility when they give user stories and features a priority. Setting features in order of importance based on clear quality standards guarantees that the team concentrates on producing features that function and efficiently satisfy customer needs. In addition to taking part in sprint reviews, stakeholders offer insightful commentary on the product's usability, functionality, and general quality. Early in the development cycle, the team can recognise and resolve quality concerns thanks to this feedback loop.

6. Entire Scrum Team

Quality in Scrum becomes a team sport rather than an individual effort. True ownership extends beyond the Development Team's writing of unit tests and code reviews. The Product Owner gives quality the highest priority while prioritising user stories, making sure features fulfil both functional and user needs. The Scrum Master removes obstacles that could affect the team's ability to provide high-quality work and keeps everyone focused. But the real world isn't always tidy.

Lack of clarity in acceptance standards could result in subjective quality, or time constraints could force people to take shortcuts. Here, cooperation and open communication are essential. The Scrum team works hard to produce high-quality work that satisfies user expectations and corporate objectives through continuous communication and development.

Conclusion

Even though quality is a shared responsibility among all team members, the Simpliaxis Certified Scrum Developer® (CSD) Certification Training is crucial for fostering a culture of quality and cooperation in Scrum teams. This program provides in-depth training on Agile principles, best practices for software development, and quality assurance procedures. It gives developers, testers, Scrum Masters, and Product Owners the tools they need to succeed in their careers and consistently generate high-quality software. 

Acquire new skills, grow professionally, and help your Scrum team succeed by enrolling in Simpliaxis's CSD Certification Training now. With Simpliaxis, software delivery quality can be enhanced, and the full potential of agile development can be realized.

FAQ’s

1. What is the role of QA in the Scrum team?

Scrum teams that apply quality assurance can better define their objectives and maintain a low deviation from the target. The roles that each participant in the product development lifecycle has duties helps to be made clearer as well.

2. What characteristics does the Scrum team model have?

A Scrum Team needs to be the following to succeed: Cohesive: They ought to function as a close-knit, cooperative team that builds mutual trust and supports one another. Concentrated: The primary goals of Scrum Teams are to generate value and accomplish the Product Goal.

3. What position in Scrum is in charge of upholding quality?

All members of the Scrum team have common accountability for quality at the end. The Product Owner, the Scrum Master, developers, and testers are all included in this.

4. Who is in charge of offering Scrum quality guidelines?

The Product Owner takes responsibility for meeting external quality standards. As we previously covered in this blog, it is the responsibility of the product developers to raise the inherent quality. The Scrum Master could implement the ideal collection of technical procedures to raise the caliber of the final product as a whole.