Member-only story
In software development, whenever there is a requirement to develop new business features, usually what happens is the Business Analyst (BA) would receive the requirements from the Product Owner (PO) or Product Manager (PM) and do their analysis on the business requirement.
The BA would break down the requirement into understandable chunks so the Software Developer would understand what to develop. Usually, these days, most people use an issue tracking/ticket management system like Atlassian JIRA to manage the work that needs to be done. The BA would write up the JIRA ticket (in the form of a “User Story”).
The Software Developer thus takes the requirements from the BA although sometimes directly from the PO/PM (this usually in the case of when there are no BAs in the software development team). Using JIRA, the Developer would bring the User Story into play and attempt to implement it.
When the story has been implemented by the Developer, the QA Tester usually takes the User Story to start testing the feature on a testing environment (usually called ‘Staging’ or ‘QA’).
The Problem
All of this process happens in a linear sequential fashion which is fine. The problem with this approach is that usually the QA Tester doesn’t get involved until quite later in the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) typically at the ‘testing’ stage.
Another side effect of this process is that they are playing “Chinese Whispers”.
First the BA would involve the Developer in some sort of discussions (or sometimes not) which involves handing off the requirements for the Developer to implement.
Once you arrive at the ‘testing’ stage, sometimes the QA Tester doesn’t even talk to the BA. The QA Tester would just talk to the Developer instead asking about the feature that was implemented and thereby trying to figure out how to test the feature. Sometimes this is dangerous as there is danger of the QA Tester testing against the implementation (which is bad!) rather than testing against the feature in verifying that the implementation satisfies the business requirement.
When things are good, then it’s happy days but when things go bad that is when you see the inefficiencies of this…
