The Regression Death Spiral

Here’s a story you might find familiar:

You’re a QA on a small development team; it’s Thursday morning in the second week of your two-week sprint. Your team still has several stories in development, and the stories need to be signed off by Friday morning to be ready for demo Friday afternoon. Your plans for a relaxing Thursday evening start to evaporate before your eyes.

In morning standup, the developers say they are wrapping up. You know they write unit tests and component tests as part of development, and you have already completed several feature walk-throughs with them, so you’re confident you’ll be getting high quality code. However, in addition to testing the stories you’ll still have to finish up the UI and API automation, validate some non-functional requirements, and do some ad-hoc sanity testing… and one day isn’t a lot of time. You can probably finish testing, but getting the automation wrapped up is going to be impossible. You give this bad, bad news to the scrum master.

“OK” says the scrum master, “how about we…” and you know exactly what is coming next. “ … how about we push automation to the next sprint?” Automation, explicitly called out in the definition of done, built into the story and always part of the estimate, is getting pushed into the future. Again. “I don’t like it either…” your scrum master says, seeing the…