Nowadays being agile is cool. All people is speaking about Scrum and agile development. There’s even people going far away and speak about Kanban. Agile development isn’t a new idea. Maybe it’s only setting up a name to an old one.Quality assurance activities should be designed to identify missing, ineffective or inefficient policies, processes and procedures used in the project. According to the PMBOK guide there’s a tool to perform quality audits called root analysis. Basically root analysis aims to find the source and the solution of the problem and helps to determine inefficiencies. Performed it regularly you can fine tune processes. The steps to perform root analysis technique:
- Define the problem
- Gather data to describe the problem
- Determine possible causes
- Select the root cause
- Develop a solution strategy
- Test and evaluate the solution
Clients must bear in mind agile development means they must take actively part within the development process. Maybe some clients don’t like this way of work. Maybe they prefer to pay for the service or deliverable and let the work for us. But really it worth the effort. Work close to the client is one of the principles of agile development. One important action to obtain the commitment between both parts is give access to the customer to the Bug Tracker. With this simple step our customer can track our work. But there’s a problem. Our bug tracker is not only an internal development tool now. It has become also into a communication tool. That’s means developers maybe decide don’t report internal technical things because they don’t want to be read by the clients.
Bug trackers can help us in our agile developement. There’s a lot of bug tracking software over there. Open source software you can install in your host, such as Mantis or Track. You can find also hosted solutions, free or paid ones. Probably Jira is the most famous and widely used software(not a free software).
Currently I’m thinking about the bug life cycle. I’m trying to standardize the way we use to face the bugs. I’ve created the following flowchart:
What do you think about this flow chart? Do You think is it is up to your requirements?