Intent of my blog
This blog is about my personal experience of giving interim build to QA team. So far now it has worked great for us.
Content
Few months back my team decided that we will be following some agile practices. So we decided to list down the practices that we will follow.We tried tdd but it failed. The only practice from that list which we have successfully followed is giving interim build to testing team during an iteration.
We follow 1 month iteration of which 3 weeks is for development and 1 week for testing. Till few months we give build to QA team only when we have done all development which means 3 weeks they were not doing any testing but were creating test scenarios and understanding user stories.As we were not following tdd ,during the testing lot of bugs were raised which were programmatic error like NullPointerException or sometimes the understanding of user story was different which leads to QA week to be a very tiring week(fixing lot of defects).Also this also leads to lot of tension and pressure on the team.
Interim Build became the SilverBullet
From the last few iterations we have started giving interim build to QA usually one or two between the development cycle.This has helped our team a lot:-
- Programmatic errors are resolved during the development cycle so cost of fixing the defect is quite low.
- Testing Team is doing testing during the development cycle.It helps testing team in understanding the application better rather than just reading documentation.
- Quality of defects raised by QA team during the QA week increased because they were able to do more functional testing rather than finding NullPointerException or validation issues.
- Pressure on developers and QA team reduced during the QA cycle.
- High Quality of Application
These are some of the benifits which we got by giving interim builds to QA team.
Please share your thoughts also.
Shekhar Gulati 
There is nothing here to imply you are doing anything agile. You might be trying iterative development, but that in itself is not agile.
From what I can tell, you are doing waterfall in shorter windows (one month).
These are harsh words, but I do not mean them as unkind… only as eye-opening.
Some steps to get you there-
– the QA team shouldn’t be an external team. There should be a QA resource on your team testing all the time.
– you shouldn’t need to test after a long window of coding, you should be testing as you go
– you should be able to create a build almost every day
– you should be delivering functionality all the time to QA
Good luck with your agile growth! Clearly you have interest and you will get there as you keep trying!